repeat one another.' Now, there are still some periods with which no
historian has grappled, and, strangely enough, the period that most
greatly fascinates me is one of them. The labour I set myself is
therefore rather Herculean. But it is also, for me, so far a labour of
love that I can quite forget or even revel in its great difficulty. I
would love to have lived in those bygone days, when first society was
inducted into the mysteries of art and, not losing yet its old and
elegant tenue, babbled of blue china and white lilies, of the painter
Rossetti and the poet Swinburne. It would be a splendid thing to have
seen the tableaux at Cromwell House or to have made my way through the
Fancy Fair and bartered all for a cigarette from a shepherdess; to
have walked in the Park, straining my eyes for a glimpse of the Jersey
Lily; danced the livelong afternoon to the strains of the Manola
Valse; clapped holes in my gloves for Connie Gilchrist.

It is a pity that the historians have held back so long. For this
period is now so remote from us that much in it is nearly impossible
to understand, more than a little must be left in the mists of
antiquity that involve it. The memoirs of the day are, indeed, many,
but not exactly illuminative. From such writers as Frith, Montague
Williams or the Bancrofts, you may gain but little peculiar knowledge.
That quaint old chronicler, Lucy, dilates amusingly enough upon the
frown of Sir Richard (afterwards Lord) Cross or the tea-rose in the
Prime Minister's button-hole. But what can he tell us of the
negotiations that led Gladstone back to public life or of the secret
councils of the Fourth Party, whereby Sir Stafford was gradually
eclipsed? Good memoirs must ever be the cumulation of gossip. Gossip
(alas!) has been killed by the Press. In the tavern or the barber's-
shop, all secrets passed into every ear. From newspapers how little
can be culled! Manifestations are there made manifest to us and we are