The way in which the example of the more comfortable classes imposes itself upon the less comfortable may of course be noticed in smaller matters than church-going; in a great many matters which it may seem trivial to mention. If one is bent upon observation nothing, however, is trivial. So I may cite the practice of keeping the servants out of the room at breakfast. It is the fashion, and so, apparently, through the length and breadth of England, every one who has the slightest pretension to standing high enough to feel the way the social breeze is blowing conforms to it. It is awkward, unnatural, troublesome for those at table, it involves a vast amount of leaning and stretching, of waiting and perambulating, and it has just that vice against which, in English history, all great movements have been made--it is arbitrary. But it flourishes for all that, and all genteel people, looking into each other's eyes with the desperation of gentility, agree to endure it for gentility's sake. Another arbitrary trifle is the custom of depriving the unhappy visitor of a napkin at luncheon. When it is observed that the English luncheon differs from dinner only in being several degrees more elaborate and copious, and that in the London atmosphere it is but common charity, at any moment, to multiply your guest's opportunities if not for ablution at least for a "dry polish," it will be perceived that such eccentricities are the very wantonness and pedantry of fashion. But, as I say, they flourish, and they form part of an immense body of prescriptive usages, to which a society possessing in the largest manner, both by temperament and education, the sense of the "inalienable" rights and comforts of the individual, contrives to accommodate itself. I do not mean to say that usage in England is always uncomfortable and arbitrary. On the contrary, few strangers can be unfamiliar with that sensation (a most agreeable one) which consists in perceiving in the excesses of a custom which has struck us at first as a mere brutal invention, a reason existing in the historic "good sense" of the English race. The sensation is frequent, though in saying so I do not mean to imply that even superficially the presumption is against the usages of English society. It is not, for instance, necessarily against the custom of which I had it more especially in mind to speak in writing these lines. The stranger in London is forewarned that at Easter all the world goes out of town, and that if he has no mind to be left as lonely as Marius on the ruins of Carthage, he, too, had better make arrangements for a temporary absence. It must be admitted that there is a sort of unexpectedness in this vernal exodus of a body of people who, but a week before, were apparently devoting much energy to settling down for the season. Half of them have but lately come back from the country, where they have been spending the winter, and they have just had time, it may be supposed, to