speakers of phonetically spelt dialect, utter themselves in the formal
phrases and studied syntax of eighteenth century rhetoric. In short, I
wrote in the style of Scott and Dickens; and as fashionable society then
spoke and behaved, as it still does, in no style at all, my
transcriptions of Oxford and Mayfair may nowadays suggest an
unaccountable and ludicrous ignorance of a very superficial and
accessible code of manners. I was not, however, so ignorant as might
have been inferred at that time from my somewhat desperate financial
condition.

I had, to begin with, a sort of backstairs knowledge; for in my teens I
struggled for life in the office of an Irish gentleman who acted as land
agent and private banker for many persons of distinction. Now it is
possible for a London author to dine out in the highest circles for
twenty years without learning as much about the human frailties of his
hosts as the family solicitor or (in Ireland) the family land agent
learns in twenty days; and some of this knowledge inevitably reaches his
clerks, especially the clerk who keeps the cash, which was my particular
department. He learns, if capable of the lesson, that the aristocratic
profession has as few geniuses as any other profession; so that if you
want a peerage of more than, say, half a dozen members, you must fill it
up with many common persons, and even with some deplorably mean ones.
For "service is no inheritance" either in the kitchen or the House of
Lords; and the case presented by Mr. Barrie in his play of The Admirable
Crichton, where the butler is the man of quality, and his master, the
Earl, the man of rank, is no fantasy, but a quite common occurrence, and
indeed to some extent an inevitable one, because the English are
extremely particular in selecting their butlers, whilst they do not
select their barons at all, taking them as the accident of birth sends
them. The consequences include much ironic comedy. For instance, we have