They were most of them highly born and highly gifted. Some afterwards attained eminence in politics and literature; and it must be admitted that they were clever enough to get themselves a great deal talked about without deliberately courting publicity at the time. Their audacities and unconventionalities enjoyed a considerable reputation, but did not often get into the papers. _Punch_ was obviously "intrigued" about them, but ingeniously disguised his curiosity by passing it on to an imaginary American visitor, "high-toned" (the word "high-brow" was a later importation) and inquiring, who came over to study our "Institootions"--Mr. Gladstone also used to pronounce it that way--and wrote down his impressions for a work on _Social Dry Rot in Europe_. So, hearing vague talk of a secret moral institution, the Society of Souls, he set to work to collect authentic information about them, but was everywhere baffled. The nearer he got to the shrine, the more negative and mysterious was the information vouchsafed. But the Philistine view is well burlesqued in his conversation with a fashionable lady who described the Souls as "a horrid stuck-up set of people who did all sorts of horrid things, all read the same books at the same time, sacrificed wild asses at the altar of Ibsen, the Hyperborean Apollo, and were bound by a rule that no Soul might ever marry another Soul." A year or so later _Punch_ noted the report that the Souls had ceased to exist, and would be replaced by a new club--the "No Bodies"--of which the membership would be unlimited. Still the Souls had had their day and, as representing an effort to establish an exclusive social coterie to which intellect or wit formed the chief passport, demand at least a passing word. The satire of fashionable culture dies down and is never very seriously revived even in the days when the late Emil Reich lectured on Plato at Claridge's. "Smart" Society was more active with its heels than with its head or its heart.