“Ah! You do not know Londoners as well as I do. They have had enough of seclusion. They have twice tasted fresh air, and they will long to taste it again. Public opinion is as strong as ever in our country; it is a wave that rolls incessantly over the London beach; the _débris_ of wrecks cast up by the sea are very soon washed away by the next wave, and so does the tide of public opinion eternally sweep away some old political hobby, and bring back some moral crank. The smallest scheme becomes a national enterprise in this island of ours, and if once Society takes up our idea, the world is saved. This evening there will be more Londoners out than there are at present. Everyone, more or less—of course invalids excepted—is unable to sacrifice practical life to a preconceived idea of virtue; we are even very much to be praised for having given up ten of our precious days to a moral principle.”
“This would not have occurred in any Latin country, for they depend so much on their intercourse with human beings; perhaps we have less merit, after all, in having remained confined so many days, as we are not so sociable as our Latin neighbours.”
“Oh! What an error, my lord; I have always thought the reverse, and firmly believe that we Britishers are the most superficial of human creatures.”
“Still, you cannot deny, Danford, that our lower classes take their pleasures gloomily?”
“I am astonished that you should make such a remark, Lord Somerville; you are too much up-to-date to bring that exploded accusation against our race. If our lower orders take Sunday rambles in our City graveyards, it is not for the dead that they go there, but partly for the flowers and the trees; mostly, however, in search of excitement. They spell the In Memoriams on tombstones as they would devour penny novelettes. It gives them a glamour of romance and tragedy, as a jeweller’s shop window opens a glittering vista of luxury to the hungry stare of a beggar. It is always what lies behind the scenes that will for ever enthral the minds of human beings. You, of the Upper Ten, have excitements of all sorts, subtle and coarse; amusements of every descriptions, frivolous or cruel; passions of all kinds, high and low; but the wearied toilers have only the routine of an eventless existence; no wonder shop windows and graveyards are their arena, but it does not follow that they take their pleasures sadly. A child will play with a dead man’s skull if he has no painted doll.”