That barbaric element in the English aristocracy, of which I have before spoken, which Mr. Matthew Arnold half likes while he impales its eccentricities, is constantly revealed in the contrasts between the baronial halls of England and the majority of the homes of the wealthy middle class. One may take as a specimen of the taste of the latter any one of the fine club buildings on or near Pall Mall. Here one feels that he is stepping on floors which the Pompeians would have thought somewhat sombre, but would have enjoyed, and amid walls and arches which they would have recognized as familiar, though strangely gloomy. The halls are large and spacious, rather costly than rich, built of purest granites and marbles of various hue; the reading, dining, and smoking rooms are comparatively quiet, and built with a view to comfort alone. The clubs represent the desire of gentlemen of means to pass their hours of leisure in palaces, and these are secured at an expenditure of less than a hundred pounds each per annum, even in the best of such institutions. But when one visits the castles of the nobility, such as are still inhabited, the fondness for color and romance is at once manifest. They love their rooms now blue, now green, and again rose-colored. They love classical frescoes--nude Muses, Graces, and Cupids chiefly--on the ceilings, and gay tints on the walls even of sleeping-rooms. In a word, my lords were sensational, and in some cases descended to the most vulgar tricks, as in the case which Wordsworth rebuked so sternly. On the occasion of a visit to Dunkeld the poet was taken into a room lined with mirrors, and where an artificial water-fall was set going by a spring being touched. The water-fall was reflected one way in the mirrors, but another way in the poet's face, and soon after in his rebuke of such mimicry of Nature:
"Ever averse to pantomime, Thee neither do they know, nor us Thy servants, who can trifle so."