“A country yeoman may say of the aristocracy, as Northcote the painter says, as regards his profession: ‘An artist may honour them as patrons; but to imagine that he can hold communion with them, on a footing of friendship, is a moral misdemeanour, for which he ought to be soundly whipped.’ “Try to introduce a topic of more than lightest and most gossipping interest, and see the effect. Instead of the warm kindling up of a truly interesting and ennobling conversation, you produce a deep silence. So many are the topics in those ranks, which, from political and other causes, would be offensive to some one or other, that all really important topics are tabooed. These gay and speciously pleasant people dare not speak their own minds in society. There may be peculiar and close little cliques in which they do; but in my time it was well known that there were not above three or four aristocratic houses in London in which there was any real freedom of discussion. You met at many of them men of science, men high in the Church and theology, men and women famous in letters, but they were as dull there as the rest. They smiled, and talked of the weather, or of the play, but their deeper thoughts were carefully locked in their souls. No, I say it—that any one who long frequents aristocratic circles, comes to feel a heavy, dull atmosphere there, and is glad to get into the middle regions to breathe life and intellectual thought once more. There is a science of dining-out discourse—the art of talking without saying anything—and those who are adroit at billiards may get well through the long after-dinner hours. I have been at many out-of-door fêtes. It was the same. You had coveys of gay people—great lords, bishops, princes even, great lawyers, and great soldiers, and their ladies. Much beauty, much collecting of gay equipages at the gates, and splendid military bands of music—but that was all. It is true what Lord Byron says— ‘He who ascends to mountain-tops, shall find The loftiest peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow.’