Thackeray himself introduces plenty of the peerage, but it cannot be
said that he is always at ease in their society. He remembers that
they are lords, and is on his guard, very often, and suspicious and
sarcastic, except, perhaps when he deals with a gentleman like Lord
Kew. He examines them like curious wild animals in the Jardin des
Plantes. He is an accomplished naturalist, and not afraid of the
lion; but he remembers that the animal is royal, and has a title.
Mr. Norris, for instance, shows nothing of this mood. Mr. Trollope
was not afraid of his Dukes: he thought none the worse of a man
because he was the high and puissant prince of Omnium. As for most
novelists, they no longer paint fashionable society with enthusiasm.
Mr. Henry James has remarked that young British peers favour the
word "beastly,"--a point which does not always impress itself into
other people so keenly as into Mr. Henry James. In reading him you
do not forget that his Tufts are Tufts. But then Tufts are really
strange animals to the denizens of the Great Republic. Perhaps the
modern realism has made novelists desert the world where Dukes and
Dowagers abound. Novelists do not know very much about it; they are
not wont to haunt the gilded saloons, and they prefer to write about
the manners which they know. A very good novel, in these strange
ruinous times, might be written with a Duke for hero; but nobody
writes it, and, if anybody did write it in the modern manner, it
would not in the least resemble the old fashionable novel.

Here a curious point arises. We have all studied the ingenious lady
who calls herself Ouida. Now, is Ouida, or rather was Ouida in her
early state sublime, the last of the old fashionable novelists, or
did Thackeray unconsciously prophesy of her when he wrote his
burlesque Lords and Liveries? Think of the young earl of Bagnigge,
"who was never heard to admire anything except a coulis de