Prejudice against any one country is an illiberal feeling, which common reflection should, and which enlightened travel usually does, entirely remove. There is a vulgar prejudice against the English in almost all countries, but more particularly in ours, which blinds its entertainers to much that is admirable, and deprives them of the good drawn from the best models. The troop of scurrilous critics, the class of English bagmen, and errant vulgarians of all kinds, and the industriously-blown coals of old hostilities, are barriers which an educated mind may well overlook, and barriers beyond which lie, no doubt, the best examples of true civilization and refinement the world ever saw. But we are getting into an essay when we should be turning down Bruton street, on our way to the Park, with all the fashion of Bond street and May Fair.
_May Fair!_ what a name for the core of dissipated and exclusive London! A name that brings with it only the scent of crushed flowers in a green field, of a pole wreathed with roses, booths crowded with dancing peasant-girls, and nature in its holyday! This—to express the costly, the courtlike, the _so called_ “heartless” precinct of fashion and art, in their most authentic and envied perfection. _Mais, les extrêmes se touchent_, and, perhaps, there is more nature in May Fair than in Rose Cottage or Honeysuckle Lodge.
We stroll on through Berkeley square, by Chesterfield and Curzon streets to the Park gate. What an aristocratic quiet reigns here! How plain are the exteriors of these houses:—how unexpressive these doors, without a name, of the luxury and high-born pride within! At the open window of the hall sit the butler and footman, reading the morning paper, while they wait to dispense the “not at home” to callers _not_ disappointed. The rooks are noisy in the old trees of Chesterfield house. The painted window-screens of the probably still-slumbering Count D’Orsay, in his bachelor’s den, are closely drawn, and, as we pass Seymour place, a crowd of gay cabs and diplomatic chariots, drawn up before the dark-green door at the farther extremity, announce to you the residence of one whose morning and evening _levees_ are alike thronged by distinction and talent—the beautiful Lady Blessington.