No study is more disheartening, none more disturbing, than the study of those companies of human beings, which in various periods of social security have attempted in similar fashion to play with the purposes of life. “Some set their hearts on building and gardening,” wrote Tavannes of the Court of the Valois, “on painting or reading or the chase. They run after an animal all day and get their faces torn in the woods; or they trot from morning till evening after a ball of wool; or they spend the day and the night in games of hazard, from which they rise without any great reluctance; or they buy arms and horses, and never use them.” “Sadness and melancholy without a legitimate cause,” he declares, “are their own just punishment; a failure to recognise the grace of God which has made us immortal.” More than an age of Adventure, more even than an age of reckless Wickedness, does time judge and condemn an age of ineffectual Pleasure. Where are the braveries, fresh or frayed? The plumes, the armours--friend and foe? The cloth of gold, the rare brocade? The mantles glittering to and fro? The pomp, the pride, the royal show? The cries of war and festival? The youth, the grace, the charm, the glow? Into the night go one and all. _Mane floreat, et transeat: vespere decidat. Et custodia in nocte_--“As a watch in the night.” II “Conquerors” they appear to the critic abroad: “the Island Pharisees” to the critic at home. Many attempts have been made in recent times to describe in fiction this new leisured life of England: the particular contemporary aspect of that Fair “wherein it was contrived should be sold all sorts of Vanity, and that it should last all the year long.” There is something of it in the _Egoist_, something also in the extraordinary analysis by Mr. Henry James of the meaning of situation in various companies of rich, idle persons whose utility or significance in any rational universe it is difficult to apprehend. Some of the younger novelists, with less detachment and with less acceptance, have attempted interpretation, not of the moods of the moment, but of the meaning of a whole society. Mr. Galsworthy, for example, in a rather fierce indictment--gazing at the struggle for continuance amongst the successful, like a spectator gazing at a struggle of ants or bees--has drawn up an impeachment of the country house and conventional life of successful England. His hero enters this society from abroad, examining it, as if for the first time, with curious eyes, without any background of the fortifying curriculum of the accepted English education. He is excited to questioning and resentment by the ironical smiles and comments of a foreigner, a chance acquaintance in a third-class carriage, who, having rejected everything, swallowed “all the formulas,” has no attitude but that of irony towards the folly of human things. He attempts to allay that resentment by personal examination of the various phases of the life