Patmore!"' The young man was so taken aback by these words that they
`eclipsed all memory of what occurred during the remainder of the
visit.'
Yet there was nothing wrong about the words themselves. Indeed, to any
one with any sense of character and any knowledge of Leigh Hunt, they
must seem to have been exactly, exquisitely, inevitably the right
words. But they should have been said sooner.
SERVANTS
1918.
It is unseemly that a man should let any ancestors of his arise from
their graves to wait on his guests at table. The Chinese are a polite
race, and those of them who have visited England, and gone to dine in
great English houses, will not have made this remark aloud to their
hosts. I believe it is only their own ancestors that they worship, so
that they will not have felt themselves guilty of impiety in not
rising from the table and rushing out into the night. Nevertheless,
they must have been shocked.
The French Revolution, judged according to the hope it was made in,
must be pronounced a failure: it effected no fundamental change in
human nature. But it was by no means wholly ineffectual. For example,
ladies and gentlemen ceased to powder their hair, because of it; and
gentlemen adopted simpler costumes. This was so in England as well as
in France.
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