to a fashionable haw-haw in the men, who ought to have something better to do than to stride or lounge along in their thousands, but who are notwithstanding, in dress, in looks, in absolute freshness and perfection of appearance, almost more wonderful than the ladies. For they are not so innocent in their dissipations as the ladies. They are up half the night; they smoke innumerable cigarettes, and indulge in strange liquids; yet turn out, or are turned out, in the morning, without a trace of harm, or an odour, or anything to show that their consciences are not as perfect as their linen – which is saying much, – or as the faultless lines of trouser – which is saying more.
And what a stream of conversation there is! how gay, how animated, how much and how little! There is no more commonplace witticism than to talk of London as a village. Those who use the word mean to be funny – mean to express the delightful confusion of a bigness which is beyond calculation with the smallness of jocular familiarity. But it is not so silly a simile as it looks. He who said it first was perhaps a profound social philosopher, and not one of the frivolous or flippant. For as you pass along slowly from group to group, or are carried away by a wave of the ebbing and flowing stream, the murmurs that reach your ear will remind you of nothing so much as the talk of the village coteries – the little world that circles round some dozen houses on the green. You will catch echoes of some domestic incident, repeated from one crowd to another, with anxious or with laughing comments. You will hear of it till you think you are yourself qualified to judge whether Charley So-and-So was bullied or beguiled into that marriage; and till you begin to think it is your duty to form an opinion whether Lady Jane actually ran away from her husband, and was stopped and brought back – or whether she only intended to run away, – or if, in fact, it was her father the Duke who took her away, declaring that his daughter should submit no longer to conduct which no lady should endure. Perhaps you imagined those soft and lovely ladies, those exquisitely-got-up young men, would talk of matters more exquisite and like the fine quintessence of humanity which you find in them. But they are not proud; they are not superior to flesh and blood. Their voices have nothing in them of the music of the spheres. And though this is the world, according to one formula, in another, the silly one, which is in a way the profound one, it is a village – a repetition of the little microcosm, which in its way is also a world.
But as a spectacle there is no prettier scene. The sunshine flickers through the trees, and the shadows fall and play upon the prettiest heads, the prettiest bonnets, the most perfectly well-cared-for, well-conditioned, well-bred of human creatures. There is something in English flesh and blood which shows the perfection of these external circumstances more than any other nationality. The darker and more impassioned beauty of the southern races, the keener outlines and quicker movements of the French, the muddier fairness and heavier form of the Germans, show less, to our eyes at least, that perfect physical perfection, unspeakable cleanness, freshness, and carefulness of all personal properties, which distinguish the English race. The southerns, perhaps, carry finery better, and may possess a more
