Whether or no decline in religion was the cause of it, it is certain that during that same generation the rigid virtues of the mid-Georgian era had been dissipated or obscured. A statesman of that earlier period would have resented the imputation of openly using his official knowledge to secure a business deal: we think of such an attitude as quixotic, but there was a certain nobility about it. The Press of that earlier period would have scorned to hush up a public scandal just because influential people were implicated in it: we call that a sentimental prejudice, but at least it was an error in the right direction. A divine of that earlier period would have felt a delicacy about subscribing to a formula of belief with which he found himself in total disagreement; it was a scruple, perhaps, but surely a scruple which did him honour. Men thought strenuously in those days, and lived earnestly, and worked without thought of reward. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven”—I can never read those lines of Wordsworth without being reminded of my girlhood’s days; and of more than one figure in the public life of that time I am tempted to say, with the regretful tone of one who has outlived her generation: “He was a man, take him for all in all, We shall not look upon his like again.” I cannot resist quoting, while I am on this subject, some words from the very last letter I ever received from my friend Lady Polebridge.[16] “You and I, my dear Opal,” she typed, “belong to a generation that is disappearing, and will not regret us (for who ever does really regret us?) when we are gone. Nothing so strongly affects me, when I look back, as the strong sense of the mutability of human things. We poor creatures choose our own friends, make our own groups round us, only for the rude hand of circumstance to redistribute and rearrange us when it wills. No illusion lasts, no experience is other than transitory. And yet when we look back upon our young days, we can surely say that there was more of stability and permanence about those peaceful, slow-going times than we can find in the bustle and hurry of to-day. Our youth belongs to the last generation of English life that really saw life steadily and saw it whole; that really had its innermost core rooted in the hard rock of purposeful, strenuous living. I shall not be sorry to go, when my turn comes, to a world full of the shadows of my old companions, where I shall perhaps find peace at last.”