bestows considerable sums on public and private charities, shepherding its friends into drawing-room meetings to listen to some attractive speaker--an actor, a Labour Member, a professional humorist--pleading for pity to the poor. It discusses the possibility of social upheavals in that dim, silent, encompassing life in which all its activities are embedded--the incalculable populations, which set the society that matters in the midst of a rude and multitudinous society that does not count. It plays in good humour with light schemes of Social Reform; wondering, like the pleasant salons of Paris in the new age of gold before the Revolution, whither events are tending; convinced, as these salons also were convinced, that nothing can alter the effectual standards of its world. It plays with religion; listening to the agreeable discourses of one popular preacher, urging kindliness and charity and toleration to all men; amused at the violence of another, denouncing all its works and ways; a little disturbed by a third, feeling the sudden intrusion of the cold hand of a universe in which all its standards are unknown. “Sydney Smith talking,” wrote Carlyle in his diary, “other persons prating, jargoning. To me, through these thin cobwebs, Death and Eternity sat glaring.” Only in an occasional solitary hour, in that magic twilight of a London summer evening, or in the flare of a dim dawn over the sleeping city, do such disturbing visitants tear the silence as with a sudden cry. It is an aggregation of clever, agreeable, often lovable people, whose material wants are satisfied by the labour of unknown workers in all the world, trying with a desperate seriousness to make something of a life spared the effort of wage-earning. It is built up and maintained in an artificial, and probably a transitory, security--security which has never been extended in the world’s history to more than a few generations. It will continue with each until each drops out, if uncomplaining, a little fatigued, and the fresh recruits take the place of the deserters and the dead.