CHAPTER XIX. MESMERIC EXPERIENCES 362 INDEX 397 WHAT I REMEMBER CHAPTER I. I have no intention of writing an autobiography. There has been nothing in my life which could justify such a pretension. But I have lived a long time. I remember an aged porter at the monastery of the “Sagro Eremo,” above Camaldoli, who had taken brevet rank as a saint solely on the score of his ninety years. His brethren called him and considered him as Saint Simon simply because he had been porter at that gate for more than sixty years. Now my credentials as a babbler of reminiscences are of a similar nature to those of the old porter. I have been here so many, many years. And then those years have comprised the best part of the nineteenth century--a century during which change has been more rapidly at work among all the surroundings of Englishmen than probably during any other century of which social history has to tell. Of course middle-aged men know, as well as we ancients, the fact that social life in England--or rather let me say in Europe--is very different from what it was in the days of their fathers, and are perfectly well acquainted with the great and oftentimes celebrated causes which have differentiated the Victorian era from all others. But only the small records of an unimportant individual life, only the memories which happen to linger in an old man’s brain, like bits of drift-weed floating round and round in the eddies of a back-water, can bring vividly before the young of the present generation those ways and manners of acting and thinking and talking in the ordinary every-day affairs of life which indicate the differences between themselves and their grandfathers.