"Troops of social cavalry" were, when Lord Beaconsfield wrote "Lothair," the characteristic glories of Rotten Row; but horses and horsemanship alike have waned. Men take their constitutional canter in costumes anciently confined to rat-catching, and the general aspect of Rotten Row suggests the idea of Mounted Infantry rather than of "Cavalry." Alongside the ride forty years ago ladies drove their pony-phaetons--a pretty practice and a pretty carriage; but both have utterly disappeared, and the only bells that "gingle in the laughing air" are the warning signals of the Petrol Fiend, as, bent on destruction, he swoops down from Marble Arch to Piccadilly. Does a captious critic gaze enquiringly on the unfamiliar verb to "gingle"? It was thus that Lord Beaconsfield wrote it in "Lothair"; even as in the same high romance he described a lady with a rich bunch of "Stephanopolis" in her hand. It is not for the ephemeral scribbler to correct the orthography of the immortal dead. As to "stoppages in Bond Street," they were isolated and noteworthy incidents in 1870; in 1906, thanks to the admission of omnibuses into the narrow thoroughfare, they are occurrences as regular as the postman's knock or the policeman's mailed tread. We have seen the aspects in which the London Season presented itself to two great men of yore. Let me now descend to a more personal level. We will imagine ourselves transported back to the year 1880, and to the month of May. A young gentleman--some five-and-twenty summers, as Mr. G. P. R. James would have said, have passed over his fair head--is standing near the steps of St. George's Hospital between the hours of eleven and midnight. He is smartly dressed in evening clothes, with a white waistcoat, a gardenia in his button-hole, and a silver-crutched stick in his hand. He is smoking a cigarette and pondering the question where he shall spend his evening, or, more strictly, the early hours of next day. He is in a state of serene contentment with himself and the world, for he has just eaten an excellent dinner, where plovers' eggs and asparagus have reminded him that the Season has really begun. To the pleasure-seeking Londoner these symptoms of returning summer mean more, far more, than the dogrose in the hedgerow or the first note of the nightingale in the copse. Since dinner he has just looked in at an evening party, which bored him badly, and has "cut" two others where he was not so likely to be missed. And now arises the vital question of the Balls. I use the plural number, for there will certainly be two, and probably three, to choose from. Here, at St. George's Hospital, our youth is at the centre of the world's social concourse. A swift and unbroken stream of carriages is pouring down from Grosvenor Square and Mayfair to Belgrave Square and Eaton Square and Chesham Place, and it meets as it goes the ascending procession which begins in Belgravia and ends in Portman Square. To-night there is a Royal Ball at Grosvenor