Sir Gorgius Midas: "Hullo! Where's all the rest of yer gone to?"
Head Footman: "If you please, Sir Gorgius, as it was past two o'clock, and we didn't know for certain whether you was coming back here, or going to sleep in the City, the hother footmen thought they might go to bed——"
Sir Gorgius: "'Thought they might go to bed,' did they? A pretty state of things, indeed! So that if I'd 'a 'appened to brought 'ome a friend, there'd 'a only been you four to let us hin, hay!"
Critics and satirists of fashionable English society in the early and middle periods of the Victorian age were mainly concerned with its arrogance and exclusiveness. As we reach the 'seventies, with the breaking down of the old caste barriers and the intrusion of the new plutocracy, the ground of attack is shifted; the "old nobility," dislodged from their Olympian fastnesses, are exhibited as not merely accepting but paying court to underbred millionaires, and eking out their reduced incomes by an irregular and undignified competition with journalists, shopkeepers, and even actors. Society had ceased to be exclusive; it was becoming "smart," and had taken to self-advertisement. Wealth without manners had invaded Mayfair.
Woes of the Country Squire
These days ushered in the age of Society journals, of Society beauties, of vulgarity in high places, of parasitic peers, of the invasion of society by American heiresses, of the beginning of the end of the chaperon, the dawn of the gospel of "self-expression," and the rebellion of sons and daughters. Money, or the lack of it, was at the root of all, or nearly all, these changes. Dukes had already begun to sell their libraries and art treasures, and the wail of the old landed aristocracy was not unfairly vocalized in "The Song of the Country Squire," to the air of "The Fine old English Gentleman," and published by Punch in the autumn of 1882:—
The fine Old English Gentleman once held a fine estate,
Of a few thousand acres of farm and forest land, with polite and punctually-paying tenants, excellent shooting, ancestral oaks, immemorial elms, and all that sort of thing.
But it hasn't been so of late;
For the rents have gone down about twenty per cent., lots of acres are laid down in grass,