Seeing and Hearing

And so the great Act draws near--the "high midsummer pomp" of Patriotism and Regality and Religion--the "one far-off divine event" to which the whole social creation has moved s...

Dryasdust is proverbially a bore, and his forms are Protean. Thus there are the Jacobite Dryasdusts, who affirm that Queen Victoria had no higher dignity than that of Dowager Pr...

"Mr. Bumpstead? Ah! I think I was at school with your good father. No? Then it must have been your uncle. You are very like him. We ran a neck-and-neck race at the University. I...

"There is no living in this country under twenty thousand a year--not that that suffices, but it entitles one to ask a pension for two or three lives." This was the verdict of H...

In describing my hero of 1880 as he surveyed his evening's amusements and chose the most rewarding, I took for granted that he had at least three balls to choose from. Nowadays...

Vastly different is the training of the English Curate. Private School, Public School, and University: cricket, football, rowing: elementary Greek and Latin, and a smattering of...

With "taste" we commonly hear "tone" combined in the eulogies of Public Schools. The Parent, who knows (though he would not for the world admit) that Tommy has learnt nothing at...

It is the middle of August, and there is nobody in London--except, of course, some four millions of people who do not count. There is nobody in London; and, most specially and n...

Sherry--but no. Just now it is a point of literary honour not to talk about sherry;[7] so, Dante-like, I do not reason about that particular wine, but gaze and pass on--only rem...

So sings, or says, Robert Browning in his ditty of the Pied Piper, and it is to be remarked that he was not driven to invent the word "nuncheon" by the necessity of finding a rh...

But the Supper which I have in mind is the substantial meal which, during the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, formed the nightly complement to the co...

But, though a special divinity always hedged, as it still hedges, the travels of an Eldest Son, the more modest journeyings of his parents were not accomplished without consider...

Cider is, I believe, still drunk at Oxford; and memory retains grateful recollections of Cider-cup beautiful as a liquid topaz, with a cluster of blue flowers floating on its br...

There is a passage in Selden's "Table-Talk" which, if I recollect it aright, may be paraphrased in some such form as this: The Lion, reeking of slaughter, met his neighbour the...

But soldiers are not much in my way, and my military signatures are few. My collection is rich in politicians. Here comes, first in date though in nothing else, that Duke of Bed...

Of Christmas amusements I can say little. My notion of them is chiefly derived from "Happy Thoughts," where Byng suggests some "Christmassy sort of thing" to amuse his guests, a...

One can picture the tempered gratitude with which the Bishops, and the ladies of the Episcopal household, and the Domestic Chaplains--those "amiable young gentlemen who make the...

To a soul early saturated with literary horrors the experience of life is a curious translation of fancy into fact. Incidents which have hitherto appeared visionary and imaginat...

With an increasing love of publicity has come an increasing contempt for reticence. In old days there were certain subjects which no one mentioned; among them were Health and Mo...

But now an entirely different spirit prevails. People seem to have lost the power of living quietly and happily in their country homes. They all have imbibed the urban philosoph...

But alas! they are "gone down to Hades, even many stalwart sons of heroes,"--with King William at their head, and Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Leicester, and Keble and Macaulay and...

"Superstition and infidelity usually go together. Professed atheists have trafficked in augury, and men who do not believe in God will believe in ghosts." To-day I take up my pa...