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The English governess, a good girl, in spite of her accent, and the unconscious fraud she was thereby perpetrating on her employers, thought she had seldom witnessed a more agreeable scene. "He treats them like princesses, and yet he makes them learn," she thought, a comment which very fairly expressed the mixture of something courtly with something masterful in the Englishman's manner.
He was in the position of paying a salary to this courtly old nobleman and statesman, who could tell him of his own intimate knowledge how Emperors conversed with one another; how the Pope fidgeted in his ornate-carved chair when the visitor talked on unwelcome topics; how a Queen and an opera-bouffe dancer waged an obscure and envenomed battle for the possession of a counting-house strong box, and in the outcome a nation was armed with inferior old muskets instead of modern weapons, and the girl got the difference expressed in black pearls.
In this manner they passed several ante-rooms, filled chiefly with guards, attendants of the Court, and their acquaintances, male and female, who, dressed in their best apparel, and with eyes rounded by eager curiosity to make the most of their opportunity, stood, with beseeming modesty, ranked against the wall, in a manner which indicated that they were spectators, not performers, in the courtly exhibition.
An old man with abundant hair, blue-white under the perpendicular light, arose at the back part of the room, making a fine picture outlined against the deep red screen. His manner was courtly, his ruddy face pleasing, his voice musical and impassioned. "He's the dress parade orator of the house," observed Radbourn.
While the humbled remnants of one sex of the ci-devant privileged classes are thus or worse employed, many persons of the other sex have preferred domestic servitude to courtly splendour, and are chambermaids or governesses, when they might have been Maids of Honour or ladies-in-waiting.
The wonderful city which, ancient and gigantic as it is, still continues to grow as fast as a young town of logwood by a water-privilege in Michigan, may soon displace those turrets and gardens which are associated with so much that is interesting and noble, with the courtly magnificence of Rich, with the loves of Ormond, with the counsels of Cromwell, with the death of Addison.
Ah! your grandsire had eyes like that, Wulf; and I have been told that when he leapt from the tower to the wall at the taking of Jerusalem, the Saracens did not love the light which shone in them nor, in faith, did I, his son, when he was angry. Proper men, the pair of you; but Sir Wulf most warriorlike, and Sir Godwin most courtly." "Now which do you think would please a woman most?"
Whenever that event took place it was believed that Devonshire would bring a writ of error. The point on which he meant to appeal from the judgment of the King's Bench related to the privileges of peerage. The tribunal before which the appeal must come was the House of Peers. On such an occasion the court could not be certain of the support even of the most courtly nobles.
The first quadrille closed in the midst of tumultuous applause, restrained by no courtly etiquette. The partners for the second quadrille advanced to the gay and inspiring sound of pipes and drums. The Princess Amelia had withdrawn from the crowd into a window recess. She was breathless and exhausted from the dance and the excitement of the last few days.
Here, in the last century, an old Heriot's Hospital boy once harboured from the pursuit of the police. The Hospital is next door to Greyfriars a courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder's Day, you may see a multitude of children playing Kiss-in-the- Ring and Round the Mulberry-bush.
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