unfurnished, and you had leisure to pick and choose, you might suit
yourself tolerably well, always with the proviso that things English
could be suitable to the foreigner. And certainly, in the 1850's, the
English commanded living conditions more desirable, on the whole, than
Americans did. They understood comfort, as distinct from luxury--a
pitch of civilization to which we are even now but just attaining.
There was not then, and until the millennium there will probably never
be, anything else in the world which so ministered to physical ease
and general satisfaction as did the conditions of life among the
English upper classes. Kublai Khan, in Xanadu, never devised a
pleasure-dome so alluring to mere human nature-especially the English
variety of it--as was afforded by an English nobleman's country-seat.
Tennyson's Palace of Art is very good in poetry, but in real life the
most imaginative and energetic real-estate dealer could not have got
so good a price for it as would gladly have been paid for the dwelling
of, for example, the Duke of Westminster. "How many gardeners have you
got?" asked an American Minister of the duke of the period, after
meeting a fresh gardener, during a long afternoon stroll through the
grounds, at each new turn of the path. "Oh, I don't know--I fancy
about forty," replied the duke, somewhat taken aback by this demand
for precise information concerning the facts of his own establishment,
which, until that moment, he probably supposed had been attended to by
Providence. And really, the machinery of life in such a place is so
hidden, it is so nearly automatic, that one might easily believe it to
be operated according to some law of nature. The servants are (or
were) so well trained, they did their jobs so well, that you were
conscious only of their being done; you never saw them a-doing. The
thought happened to cross your mind, of a morning, that you would like
to take a drive at eleven o'clock; you were not aware that you had
mentioned the matter; but at eleven o'clock the carriage was, somehow,