--his own house in Carlton Gardens, which he had occupied during his
brief and brilliant parliamentary career; since then, left contemptuously
to the care of a house agent, to be let by year or by season, it had
known various tenants of an opulence and station suitable to its space
and site. Dinners and concerts, routs and balls, had assembled the
friends and jaded the spirits of many a gracious host and smiling
hostess. The tenure of one of these temporary occupants had recently
expired; and, ere the agent had found another, the long absent owner
dropped down into its silenced halls as from the clouds, without other
establishment than his old servant Mills and the woman in charge of the
house. There, as in a caravansery, the traveller took his rest, stately
and desolate. Nothing so comfortless as one of those large London houses
all to one's self. In long rows against the walls stood the empty
fauteuils. Spectral from the gilded ceiling hung lightless chandeliers.
--The furniture, pompous, but worn by use and faded by time, seemed
mementos of departed revels. When you return to your house in the
country--no matter how long the absence, no matter how decayed by neglect
the friendly chambers may be, if it has only been deserted in the
meanwhile (not let to new races, who, by their own shifting dynasties,
have supplanted the rightful lord, and half-effaced his memorials)--the
walls may still greet you forgivingly, the character of Home be still
there. You take up again the thread of associations which had, been
suspended, not snapped. But it is otherwise with a house in cities,
especially in our fast-living London, where few houses descend from
father to son,--where the title-deeds are rarely more than those of a
purchased lease for a term of years, after which your property quits you.
A house in London, which your father never entered, in which no elbow-
chair, no old-fashioned work-table, recall to you the kind smile of a
mother; a house that you have left as you leave an inn, let to people
whose names you scarce know, with as little respect for your family