scandals and Alabama Claims, hardly made a discordant note.

At the Legation, Motley ruled; the long Adams reign was
forgotten; the rebellion had passed into history. In society no
one cared to recall the years before the Prince of Wales. The
smart set had come to their own. Half the houses that Adams had
frequented, from 1861 to 1865, were closed or closing in 1870.
Death had ravaged one's circle of friends. Mrs. Milnes Gaskell
and her sister Miss Charlotte Wynn were both dead, and Mr. James
Milnes Gaskell was no longer in Parliament. That field of
education seemed closed too.

One found one's self in a singular frame of mind -- more
eighteenth-century than ever -- almost rococo -- and unable to
catch anywhere the cog-wheels of evolution. Experience ceased to
educate. London taught less freely than of old. That one bad
style was leading to another -- that the older men were more
amusing than the younger -- that Lord Houghton's breakfast-table
showed gaps hard to fill -- that there were fewer men one wanted
to meet -- these, and a hundred more such remarks, helped little
towards a quicker and more intelligent activity. For English
reforms Adams cared nothing. The reforms were themselves
mediaeval. The Education Bill of his friend W. E. Forster seemed
to him a guaranty against all education he had use for. He
resented change. He would have kept the Pope in the Vatican and
the Queen at Windsor Castle as historical monuments. He did not
care to Americanize Europe. The Bastille or the Ghetto was a
curiosity worth a great deal of money, if preserved; and so was a
Bishop; so was Napoleon III. The tourist was the great
conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt. Adams came back