Distant friends thou bringest near, To delight our eye and ear; Thou can'st give, sweet dream, a bliss CLARA. THE COUNTRY CAMPAIGN OF A MAN OF FASHION. "I am nothing if not critical." SHAKSPEARE. I was reading the other day Mr. Jekyl's proposal to country gentlemen, and I could not help wishing most heartily, as I threw it aside, that there were some such method really adopted to make these manor-house visits more tolerable. Country gentlemen, who insist upon receiving their acquaintance at their country houses, ought to make it a point of necessity to entertain their minds with the same liberality as they would provide for their eating and drinking. In former times, and indeed at present, there are found a sort of people who are satisfied with the respect paid to their persons. The best room, the best bottle of wine, and the best dinner, nay, even wax lights, where tallow candles are used in common, can make a visit a very delightful occurrence. But such dull characters do not come under my consideration. These are not the prevailing manners of the age; it is, therefore, less excusable in those who would themselves be ill satisfied with such a reception to give it to others. It is vain to say, that if we are not satisfied with our entertainment, we have only ourselves to blame for accepting it; a man must be fété in the country as well as in town-it is just as necessary to his consequence. But, to say the truth, I had agreed in these complaints as mere matters of course, for I had lounged about town without having much opportunity of lounging about the country. To confess the truth again, I had never been considered of consequence sufficient to be asked to the rural retreats of my friends; and, though I took my place in good company in town as the cadet of a good family, it was only the heir of our honors and our wealth who was admitted to the more ambitious diversions of the country. When I first began life, in the literal sense of the phrase, there were more than a dozen persons betwixt me and the succession that has since fallen to me; and now that I have begun life again, in its more extensive meaning, it is just about four months since I followed to the grave, as chief mourner, the remains of the late representative of our house. I was a very different person as Sir Charles from Mr. Churchill; and, as I stepped back when the sexton threw the earth upon the coffin, a fashionable friend, whose two fashionable daughters had sometimes admitted me to the honor of being their partner in a quadrille, advised me to run down with him next day into Yorkshire and shoot flappers, to dissipate more gloomy thoughts. A sort of feeling of decency made me decline the proposal; but, about three weeks after, as I was arranging in my mind the long list of invitations that had lately crowded on me, I found it would be impossible to visit that part of the country, and not accept of the most urgent hospitality of my first friend. I was amused with the various manners of my invitations. "We shall see you Churchill, I fancy," said a nobleman, extricating himself from the Catholic Claims and a Member of Parliament, as I was jostled against him in the lobby of the House of Commons: "We start for Northamptonshire in a day or two." "You'll take us in your way," said a lady, whose daughter I had formerly never even ventured to admire à la distance, in answer to some observation of mine on the beauty of Derbyshire; 26 we are "close to the Peak, the beautiful Peak." en "Oh! Sir Charles, if you're a sketcher," said some one passant, "you shall positively go down with us into Kent next week. My girls rave about Kent and Tunbridge." 66 "Lord, if you're a man for the waters, Charles," said an old schoolfellow," come into Devonshire. There's a climate for you! "Sarah has got as strong as a horse since my father took us all down "there in the summer-thrown off all her wraps, little red cloak and "all." "What! do you care for that sort of thing?" said some one else. "Then come and see us in Shropshire-no! there's costume, that is "beautiful! quite a picture scene." "Well, you see, here we are, just on the wing," cried a gentleman, who was standing with one foot on the step of his carriage, as I passed him on my lounge up and down Piccadilly. "How com"fortable you look," said I, bowing to the well-packed coach-full, just by way of something to say and to do. "Well, suppose we take you along with us," added he; are you for a seat? You see "there's a corner left for you. I'm for the box-I'm always for "plenty of fresh air in hot weather: come, in with you." I longed to begin my career, so I accepted all these overtures of civility, perhaps, with a little too much gratitude to shew myself a proficient in my new dignity. The commencement of my tour landed me, as I thought for a moment, back again in London in the very midst of one of its most bustling hotels. The master and mistress of the house had gone to dress, bells were ringing in all directions, servants of all colors and all liveries were hurrying to and fro, and the smell of rich soup nearly overpowered me as a consequential-looking butler, heated with his services and the weather, and fresh powdered and pomatumed, ushered me into my room to dress for dinner. When I got into the drawing room, I found I had kept dinner waiting, and had only time, as I followed the long line of well-ordered couples into the dining apartment, to perceive that there was not one face among them I had ever seen before. I found out, during the first course, most of the company were much in the same predicament; and, I believe, before the evening was over, we were all pretty well agreed that it was no matter whether we ever saw each other again. Our party broke up at night: carriages came to the door with as much bustle as at a crowded assembly in a crowded street. Some half dozen families were despatched, but a sufficient number of guests remained to make the breakfast of next morning quite as heavy and unsatisfactory as the dinner of the evening before. I scarce know how the morning passed, it certainly was not long, but it was most fatiguing. We were teased and tutored and kept in a perpetual worry: posted out to take as much advantage of the fine day as possible, and posted in to eat a hot luncheon laid out on a long table; then, crammed and heated, we were forced into a little music room, to hear "some delightful music" from any of the company who could be prevailed on to exert themselves to their own, and every other person's, annoyance; and then, in the middle of really a pretty duett, which two good-natured sisters were singing, gigs, and curricles, and open landaus appeared, and we were all manoeuvred into the most troublesome seats, with the least agreeable companions, to take a drive the God knows where, and brought in again at five to dress for a six o'clock dinner, because we keep country hours." A fresh party from the neighbourhood joined us at table, merely to disturb the little attempt at intimacy which our common misfortunes of the morning might have effected. No wonder that etiquette should have assigned, what is, by courtesy, called three days in reality only one, as the outside of a friend's visit. My next stage brought me more among my acquaintance; but they were ill numbered, and worse sorted. We were a fashionable party too small for a rout, and too large for agreeable intercourse. We played billiards in boots all day, and drank champaign in silk stockings and pumps at night. Hence I went to spend three days with an old friend of my father's. It was a very different establishment, and I found them just as the lady had assured me, with an assumed air of deprecating what she meant as an enhancement of its pleasures, a family party. There were no children, which I should have been young enough rather to have liked; but there were a number of daughters, the elder one or two pleasing and easy, the younger shy and awkward. The eldest son was a sort of gentleman farmer, so took the privilege of trying to hide a yawn all dinner time, and falling asleep whenever the ladies rose from table. There was a fine boy at home for the holidays, who, with the independence of a schoolboy, made his appearance from out of doors, dusted and mudded from head to foot, just as the cloth was being removed, and kept the servants waiting upon him at one end of the table, while we drank our wine at the other. He retired to dress while tea was making, which never failed to produce a quarrel betwixt him and the tea maker, either because he chose to be late, or to declare the tea bad when he came. After this, he was content to look alive for the rest of the evening, and was, indeed, the only one who seemed to have no difficulty in the matter. The father and mother dozed in arm chairs on each side the fire place, the two elder daughters sang songs and played waltzes alternately at my request, and the younger girls were so discomposed by my drinking wine with them at dinner, that they could not look at me ever afterwards without blushing all over. Breakfast was rather pleasant. The elder brother had breakfasted early and gone out, the younger had not made his appearance, and the gentleman and his wife took life easily, and were left to breakfast by themselves at a later hour, so I had the young ladies all to myself. The morning, however, dragged a little-there were too many daughters for one young man, and the parents were sober people, and checked what, perhaps, after all, might have ripened into rather an agreeable flirtation between some of us. Had I stayed longer, I might have grown into liking the ways of the house; but as it was, though very kindly invited, my impressions were not sufficiently strong for me to put myself out of my way either to remain or to return. I hardly know which is worst, the ennui of too little sobriety or too much. The next family to whose residence I proceeded, presented a most alarming contrast to the quiet household of my father's friend. For three weeks I was literally nearly worried out of my existence. All day and all night there was one perpetual racket. It was impossible to retreat for a little rest into any one corner of the house without being hunted out of it. I was shoved from room to room to make way for fresh comers-put to sleep in one, to dress in another, then back again to my original apartment. My furniture was carried off in the same manner, appearing and disappearing piece-meal. One day I had no candlestick, another day no looking-glass; then there were beds laid down in the lobbies, and all the sofas in the house put in requisition for bedsteads. The rooms were equally adapted to all sorts of purposes: for a week we breakfasted in the entrance hall, because the breakfast parlor was turned into a theatre: then we had to sit in the anti-chamber all evening, because the drawing rooms were taken up with the performers rehearsing. One night we had a galante showman in with his show: another, we were all sent down to the servants' hall to see the servants dance to an old blind fidler. After this, we had balls up stairs, and a man, who set up for a mimic, took off opera-house dancing; then up started a Kean and a Kemble, upon which some one cleverer than the rest went through the whole stage. In the mornings we had parties to fish and to shoot, and parties on the water, pic-nic parties to old ruins, and tea under a great beech tree; dances by moonlight on the grass, and suppers in an ornamented cottage; and one evening, when we had just settled to something like a peaceable dinner, the dessert and wine were ordered up to a summer house, and we were hurried off to equip in rural costume for the pleasure of partaking of it in masquerade. Had we been people heartily agreed to play the fool together, we might have cheerfully put aside our own tastes and inclinations for the sake of the diversion of the rest; but no, the whole thing was heartless, the gaiety was hollow. We were a set of persons of all ages, sexes, and characters, collected together to kill time, not to enjoy it; and, instead of being gratified by the pains taken to amuse us, we could only be annoyed at the trouble we were forced into to amuse, or rather not to amuse, ourselves. In some houses I was entertained in cottage style, put to play bowls all day, and to bed at ten o'clock at night. Sometimes I was obliged to fever myself with drinking to please mine host, and eating to please mine hostess; and, in one place, I was left so completely to myself, that having met with an accident out riding which detained me past the dinner hour, it was evident, when I made my appearance again in the evening, no one had missed me. But this is nothing to the regular routine of company in a great dull house, where the whole thing is gone through out of duty. A form kept up for form's sake, not for the pleasure communicated either by the visited or the visitors. The effort at vivacity here, which society in some measure enforces, is intolerable. You stay your prescribed visit, and are received to-day and parted with to-morrow as a necessary burthen, and a burthen the less. The very smiles and jokes seem appointed to the several periods of the entertainments, and with a sort of pretence at freedom, it is an absolute impossibility to regulate your own motions in any one way of your own choosing. The gentlemen are committed, after breakfast, to the host's care for his regular provision of morning diversions; and the ladies to that of the hostess, to be enlivened by the usual conversation and the usual fine works and fine drives. Then the melancholy attempt at good fellowship in the evening-the whole party having to assemble to a minute before dinner, after the forced separation of the morning, to await, in the sombre drawing room, the one solemn stroke of the great dull gong. Routine is the only feeling of the day in this description of great houses, and I know not whether the constant constraint of mind is not full as irksome as the more evident constraint of body. It is in houses of this kind where the prevailing bad taste often seems to -spring from bad feeling. Popularity is affected by a promiscuous intercourse with all ranks and characters, or condescension is marked |