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Dominey, who was first scrutinised by an individual in buff waistcoat and silk hat at the porter's lodge, was interviewed by a major-domo in the great stone hall, conducted through an extraordinarily Victorian drawing-room by another myrmidon in a buff waistcoat, and finally ushered into a tiny little boudoir leading out of a larger apartment and terminating in a conservatory filled with sweet-smelling exotics.
Women had not left their homes to go into offices and factories, but unless we can hold to the standard described by the Englishman, the change has not been for the better, for any of the people concerned. Since the Victorian era our ideas of what constitutes an act of rudeness have been modified.
From the point of view of a Victorian aristocrat like Palmerston, Socialism would be the cheek of gutter snipes; Imperialism would be the intrusion of cads. But cads are not alone concerned. Broadly, the phase in which the Victorian epoch closed was what can only be called the Imperialist phase. Between that and us stands a very individual artist who must nevertheless be connected with that phase.
"It's hanging in the billiard-room a big steamer in a storm." By this time Phillis and Robin had joined the conclave. "I know," said Phillis, nodding her head; "a great beautiful boat in some waves. I should fink it was a friend of the Great Eastern's," she added, referring to an antiquated print of the early Victorian leviathan which hung in the nursery.
But sheer instinct and good moral tradition made him right, for instance, about Henry VIII.; right where Froude is wildly wrong. Dickens's imagination could not re-picture an age where learning and liberty were dying rather than being born: but Henry VIII. lived in a time of expanding knowledge and unrest; a time therefore somewhat like the Victorian.
We had not even begun to suspect that our morals, manners, and laws were fairly poor compared with the standards of the Mohawks and Mohicans whom our settlers had displaced in America a century before. And Ruskin told that Victorian society it had an ugly mind, and did ugly things.
This social aspect of thought colours the poetry, the romance, the literature, the art, and the philosophy of the Victorian Age. Literature has been the gainer thereby in originality and in force. It has been the loser in symmetry, in dignity, in grace.
To set The Gentle Art beside The Dissertation on the Letters of Phalaris, Gibbon's Vindication, or the polemics of Voltaire, would be as unjust as to hang "Cremorne Gardens" in the Arena Chapel. Whistler was not even cock of the Late Victorian walk; both Oscar Wilde and Mr. Bernard Shaw were his masters in the art of controversy.
Violet was aged four and a self-possessed, plump, clever little creature, with lovely hair hanging in Victorian ringlets down her back.
Then he stopped, to look through the railings and open gateway at an enclosure on the left, and the substantial, heavily-respectable group of early Victorian buildings beyond. Some well-dressed men were standing talking in one of the porches.
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