About me leaped and laughed
The modish Cupid of the day,
And shrilled his tinselled shaft.--Tennyson.


If times differ, human nature and national character vary but little;
and thus, in looking back on former times, we are by turns startled
by what is curiously like, and curiously unlike, our own sayings and
doings.

The feelings of a retired officer of the nineteenth century expecting
the return of his daughters from the first gaiety of the youngest
darling, are probably not dissimilar to those of Major Delavie, in
the earlier half of the seventeen hundreds, as he sat in the deep bay
window of his bed-room; though he wore a green velvet nightcap; and
his whole provision of mental food consisted of half a dozen worn
numbers of the _Tatler_, and a _Gazette_ a fortnight old. The chair
on which he sat was elbowed, and made easy with cushions and pillows,
but that on which his lame foot rested was stiff and angular. The
cushion was exquisitely worked in chain-stich, as were the quilt and
curtains of the great four-post bed, and the only carpeting consisted
of three or four narrow strips of wool-work. The walls were plain
plaster, white-washed, and wholly undecorated, except that the
mantelpiece was carved with the hideous caryatides of the early
Stewart days, and over it were suspended a long cavalry sabre, and
the accompanying spurs and pistols; above them the miniature of an
exquisitely lovely woman, with a white rose in her hair and a white
favour on her breast.

The window was a deep one projecting far into the narrow garden below,