An example of the results which may be achieved by a memoir-writer who neglects this caution is provided by Augustus Hare. Hare was a man possessed of many accomplishments. Like Hamilton Aide, he was a very remarkable artist. He was also a great teller of stories, and a master in the craft of improving whatever truth there might be in them. By birth and otherwise he was well and widely connected, and was a familiar figure in many of the best-known houses in England. He was an indefatigable writer of memoirs, and of all such writers he was incomparably the most intrepid. The possibility of offending others, even though they might be his hosts and hostesses, had no terrors for him. I was once staying at a country house in Sussex when a new book by him appeared, and had just been sent down from Mudie's. I had twice seen its back on a table, and meant to have looked at it in my bedroom before dressing for dinner; but whenever I tried to secure it for my own perusal it had disappeared. I heard someone casually say, "Everybody in the house is reading it." I could not but wonder why. I managed to secure it at last, and set myself to find out the reason. It did not take long to find. Hare, a year before, had been staying in that very house--a house famous for the material perfection of its equipments. "The servants here," so Hare wrote and printed, "are notoriously more pampered than those in any other house in England, and their insolence and arrogance is proportionate to the luxury in which they live." On another occasion he recorded a visit to Castle ----, the family name of the owners being C----. He summed up his gratitude to his entertainers in the following pithy sentence, "Except dear Lady ----, I never could stand the C----s." Another of his entries was as follows. Having migrated from the Stanhopes' at Chevening to a neighboring old house in Kent, he wrote, "What a comfort it is, after staying with people who are too clever, to find oneself with people who are all refreshingly stupid!" If it were not for the danger of lapsing into indiscretions like these--indiscretions of which Hare seemed altogether unconscious--interesting anecdotes might be here indefinitely multiplied. Even so, however, such anecdotes, no matter who recorded them, would be simply so many jottings which owed their continuity to the fact that, like the stones of a necklace, they happened to be strung on the thread of a single writer's experiences, and in no two cases would this thread be altogether the same. My own experiences of the social life of London, as I knew it in my earlier days, will perhaps best be described in more general terms. In such terms, then, let me speak of it as, foreshortened by time, it now presents itself to my memory.