Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: October 12, 2025
"I'd rough it in a campaign as well as any linesman," said the cornet of her Majesty's Life Guards; "give me a pint of claret and a chicken every day, or a cut at a joint, and I would ask for nothing more;" and the Belgravian knight's idea of the discomforts of war is very like that of the beleaguered Gaul.
There came the Knights of the Griffin, and the Dragon, and the Black Lion and the Golden Lion, and the Dolphin and the Stag's Head, and they were all always scrupulously addressed by their chivalric names, instead of by the Tommys and the Jemmys that circulated in the affectionate circle of White's, or the Gusseys and the Regys of Belgravian tea-parties.
For the last three months Miss Newcome has been the greatest lioness in London: the reigning beauty winning the horse: the first favourite out of the whole Belgravian harem. No young woman of this year has come near her: those of past seasons she has distanced and utterly put to shame. Heaven bless you! this year Farintosh will not look at Miss Blackcap!
We have not yet mustered up courage for the attempt to show what should be its proper cultivation; but we may safely say that so long as it is left in the hands of those who are influenced by merely mercenary or interested motives, and who watch the "attentions" of a bachelor, not in the spirit of a philosopher or a philanthropist, but in that of a Belgravian mother, it cannot be cultivated as a fine art.
On the Sunday evening the Temple is commonly calm. The chambers are for the most part vacant: the great lawyers are giving grand dinner-parties at their houses in the Belgravian or Tyburnian districts; the agreeable young barristers are absent, attending those parties, and paying their respects to Mr. Kewsy's excellent claret, or Mr.
Most of the dancers were in evening dress, and it would have been impossible to tell the ball from a Belgravian gathering, except by the preponderance of youth and beauty. Where could you match such a bevy of brunettes, where find such blondes? They were anything but lymphatic, these oriental blondes, if their eyes did not sparkle so intoxicatingly as those of the darker majority.
Visions of a workhouse infirmary for her child had haunted the old woman in the basement breakfast-room of the decayed Belgravian house. “If you had not found such a good husband, my dear,” she used to say to her daughter, “I don’t know what would have become of that poor boy.”
The windows of the dining-room were opened to let in the fresh air, and afforded to the passers-by in the street a pleasant, or perhaps, tantalising view of six gentlemen in white waistcoats with a quantity of decanters and a variety of fruits before them little boys, as they passed and jumped up at the area-railings and took a peep, said to one another, "Hi hi, Jim, shouldn't you like to be there and have a cut of that there pineapple?" the horses and carriages of the nobility and gentry passed by conveying them to Belgravian toilets: the policeman, with clamping feet patrolled up and down before the mansion: the shades of evening began to fall: the gasman came and lighted the lamps before Sir Francis's door: the butler entered the dining-room, and illuminated the antique gothic chandelier over the antique carved oak dining-table: so that from outside the house you looked inwards upon a night-scene of feasting and wax-candles; and from within you beheld a vision of a calm summer evening, and the wall of Saint James's Park, and the sky above, in which a star or two was just beginning to twinkle.
Mrs Verloc then looked younger; she looked as young as Winnie used to look, and much more animated than the Winnie of the Belgravian mansion days had ever allowed herself to appear to gentlemen lodgers. Mr Verloc’s anxieties had prevented him from attaching any sense to what his wife was saying. It was as if her voice were talking on the other side of a very thick wall.
There was nothing in it that any well-bred footman could object to; nothing that anybody with one grain of genuine originality could possibly tolerate. The little occasional chairs and tables set casually about the room were of the strictest neglige Belgravian type, a sort of studied protest against the formal stiffness of the ordinary unused middle-class drawing-room.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking