130 PRÆTERITA-I

with great savoir faire and pleasant courtesy, no less than the most attentive patience: and they were productive of the more confidence between him and the country merchant, that he was perfectly just and candid in appraisement of the wine of rival houses, while his fine palate enabled him always to sustain triumphantly any and every ordeal of blindfold question which the suspicious customer might put him to. Also, when correspondents of importance came up to town, my father would put himself so far out of his way as to ask them to dine at Herne Hill, and try the contents of his own cellar. These London visits fell into groups, on any occasions in the metropolis of interest more than usual to the provincial mind. Our business dinners were then arranged so as to collect two or three country visitors together, and the table made symmetrical by selections from the house’s customers in London, whose conversation might be most instructive to its rural friends.

Very early in my boy’s life I began much to dislike these commercial feasts, and to form, by carefully attending to their dialogue, when it chanced to turn on any other subject than wine, an extremely low estimate of the commercial mind as such;-estimate which I have never had the slightest reason to alter.

Of our neighbours on Herne Hill we saw nothing, with one exception only, afterwards to be noticed.¹ They were for the most part well-to-do London tradesmen of the better class, who had little sympathy with my mother’s old-fashioned ways, and none with my father’s romantic sentiment.

150. There was probably the farther reason for our declining the intimacy of our immediate neighbours, that most of them were far more wealthy than we, and inclined to demonstrate their wealth by the magnificence of their establishments. My parents lived with strict economy, kept

¹ [See below, p. 138.]

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