Then, again, as to what may be called the Manners of Eating. A man who put his elbows on the table would have been considered a Yahoo, and he who should eat his asparagus with a knife and fork would have been classed with the traditional collier who boiled his pineapple. Fish-knives (like oxidized silver biscuit-boxes) were unknown and undreamt-of horrors. To eat one's fish with two forks was the _cachet_ of a certain circle, and the manner of manipulating the stones of a cherry pie was the _articulus stantis vel cadentis_. The little daughter of a great Whig house, whose eating habits had been contracted in the nursery, once asked her mother with wistful longing, "Mamma, when shall I be old enough to eat bread and cheese with a knife, and put the knife in my mouth?" and she was promptly informed that not if she lived to attain the age of Methuselah would she be able to acquire that "unchartered freedom." On the other hand, old gentlemen of the very highest breeding used after dinner to rinse their mouths in their finger-glasses, and thereby caused unspeakable qualms in unaccustomed guests. In that respect at any rate, if in no other, the most inveterate praiser of times past must admit that alteration has not been deterioration. Another marked change in society is the diminution of stateliness. A really well-turned-out carriage, with a coachman in a wig and two powdered footmen behind, is as rare an object in the Mall as a hansom in Bermondsey or a tandem in Bethnal Green. Men go to the levée in cabs or on motor-cars, and send their wives to the Palace Ball in the products of the Coupé Company. The Dowager Duchess of Cleveland (1792-1883) once told me that Lord Salisbury had no carriage. On my expressing innocent surprise, she said, "I have been told that Lord Salisbury goes about London in a brougham;" and her tone could not have expressed a more lively horror if the vehicle had been a coster's barrow. People of a less remote date than the Duchess's had become inured to barouches for ladies and broughams for men, but a landau was contemned under the derogatory nickname of a "demi-fortune," and the spectacle of a great man scaling the dizzy heights of the 'bus or plunging into the depths of the Twopenny Tube would have given rise to lively comment. A pillar of the Tory party, who died not twenty years ago, finding his newly-married wife poking the fire, took the poker from her hands and said with majestic pain, "My dear, will you kindly remember that you are now a countess?" A Liberal statesman, still living, when he went to Harrow for the first time, sailed up the Hill in the family coach, and tradition does not report that his schoolfellows kicked him with any special virulence.