But quite apart from these characteristics which depend on similar antecedents, society in a country house possesses advantages which in a London life are, from the nature of the case, impossible. At a fashionable evening party in London a lady, when she talks to a man, gives him generally the impression, as soon as she has exchanged a word with him, that the one wish of her life is to be talking to somebody else. London conversations, even at dinners, when neither party for an hour or so is able to desert the other, are in any case cut short, like chapters of a novel which are torn away from their context. Country-house conversations are like novels which, if laid down at one moment, can be taken up again the next. The atmosphere of London is one of constant excitement. The atmosphere of a country house is one of interest pervaded by repose. Each night there is a dinner party, but there is no going out to dinner, and there is no separation afterward. What is there comparable in London to the sense of secluded parks, or of Scotch or of Irish hillsides, where society is not absent, but is present only as concentrated in the persons of a few individuals, who at happy moments may be temporarily reduced to two, and where all become new beings in new and undisturbed surroundings?
Further, let me observe this--I have here an eye on my own case in particular--that, for an unmarried man with a literary purpose in life, the enjoyment of such society is heightened by the fact--the very important fact--that at any moment he may shut himself up in his bedroom as soon as the housemaids have done with it, and devote himself to his own avocations like a hermit in an African desert. Of such serious work as I have myself accomplished, I have accomplished a large part in hermitages of this description; and the fact that society was never very far away I have usually felt as a stimulus, and very rarely as a disturbance.
Friends have often suggested to me that even persons whose own acquaintance with country houses is extensive might be interested by a description of some that I have known myself. I have indeed known as many of such houses as most people; but no one person can know more than a limited number of them; and even of this limited number I, in a volume like the present, can mention only a few. I will take them in the order in which for geographical or architectural reasons they most readily recur to my own memory. I may begin with two which deserve to be coupled together on account of the positions which they occupy--namely, the extreme northeast of Great Britain in one case, and the extreme southwest in the other. I allude to Dunrobin Castle in Sutherland, and St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall.