The full luxury of that grief is reserved for those who, a decade hence, shall moralize on "the London Season," for the thing which now we so describe will then have utterly perished, and its name will only arouse a tender and regretful emotion. Even now we have seen its glories fade, and soon it will have shared the fate of those Venetian splendours which Wordsworth mourned. But in the meantime it still exists, though in a vastly different form from that which it wore in mid-Victorian years. Just now I was describing some of the changes which have occurred since the distant days when Bulwer-Lytton and Lord Beaconsfield described London in May; and, following humbly in their wake, I endeavoured to depict it as it was when I had my part in it. But change only yields place to change. Society, like the individuals who compose it, passes onward in perpetual vicissitude. As Shelley says, "Naught may endure but mutability." So the London Season of 1906 differs as notably from the Season of 1880 as the Season of 1880 from that of 1846. Let me catalogue some of the changes and try to account for them. In the first place, the Season is much less exactly circumscribed by dates. In days gone by, it began with the Opening of Parliament, which was always about the 7th of February, and it lasted, with its regular intermissions for Easter and Whitsuntide, till the last week of July. Then Society transported itself in turn to Goodwood, to Cowes, and to a German watering-place or a Scotch moor, according to its physical condition, and it was darkly rumoured that, if people found themselves compelled by domestic or financial reasons to remain in London during August, they sought to escape detection by keeping the windows fronting the street closely shuttered, and lived in their back rooms in unbroken contemplation of the leads and the mews. If you chanced to meet a man in Piccadilly in September, you might be sure that he would be wearing country clothes and would assure you that he was only "passing through" between Doncaster and Scotland. Nowadays the Season has no particular limits. London is nearly as full in December as it is in May. Dinners and plays and suppers at restaurants are as frequent, and, barring the fogs, as bright, at Christmas as at Midsummer. Even in September Clubland is not deserted; and there are people bold enough to defy the world by returning from their summer exodus as early as October. The reason for the change, as for many others like it, is the reduction of territorial incomes. 1880 may be taken as, roughly, the last of the good years for agriculture. The incessant rains of 1879 had even then begun to tell their tale. Tenants were asking for big reductions, and farms hitherto eagerly sought were becoming unlettable. I know a landowner on a great scale who, a year or two later, only pocketed 10 per cent. of his income from land, whereas five years before he would have thought an abatement of 10 per cent. disastrous.