Nothing that seemed
to smell of the shop or of the lecture-room was wanted. One might
as well have talked of Renan's Christ at the table of the Bishop
of London, as talk of German philology at the table of an Oxford
don. Society, if a small literary class could be called society,
wanted to be amused in its old way. Sydney Smith, who had amused,
was dead; so was Macaulay, who instructed if he did not amuse;
Thackeray died at Christmas, 1863; Dickens never felt at home,
and seldom appeared, in society; Bulwer Lytton was not sprightly;
Tennyson detested strangers; Carlyle was mostly detested by them;
Darwin never came to town; the men of whom Motley must have been
thinking were such as he might meet at Lord Houghton's
breakfasts: Grote, Jowett, Milman, or Froude; Browning, Matthew
Arnold, or Swinburne; Bishop Wilberforce, Venables, or Hayward;
or perhaps Gladstone, Robert Lowe, or Lord Granville. A
relatively small class, commonly isolated, suppressed, and lost
at the usual London dinner, such society as this was fairly
familiar even to a private secretary, but to the literary
American it might well seem perfection since he could find
nothing of the sort in America. Within the narrow limits of this
class, the American Legation was fairly at home; possibly a score
of houses, all liberal, and all literary, but perfect only in the
eyes of a Harvard College historian.
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