Reviews of A Narrative of a Year's Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 by William Gifford Palgrave, Published 1865 [‎1v] (2/42)

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Miss Berry's
object of ridicule or ground of offence. By its very familiarity
and kindliness, tins society was liable to the invasion of the
o-arrulous and the tiresome; but even the specimens of that in
evitable species which were found there, were more tolerable
than in houses of greater pretence, and became inspired by the
o-enius of the place with some sense of mercy or of shame^
From the multitudinous shape which London^ society is now
assuming, two consequences are imminent; the rarity of these huge
reunions from the unfitness or inability of our houses to contain
them, and the retirement within a very limited circle of rela
tives and private friends of those persons who would have been
willing, in the old time, to have contributed a proper share to the
social enjoyment of others. With the excuse of real discomfort
abroad, joined to an Englishman's natural inclinations to stay at
home ; with the difficulty of meeting the few he likes, added to the
certainty of encountering a crowd he abhors ; with the increasing
severity of the duties and responsibilities of public life, and the
diminution of the external respect and importance it imparts, there
is every inducement to our wealthier, and nobler, and more fas
tidious countrymen to retain an exclusiveness of habits and an
isolation of life, which can be indulged in with impunity by
Legitimists in Paris or Men of Letters in Boston, but which, if
systematically persisted in, will seriously impair the relations of
classes, and the political structure of our civil existence. The
great can no longer remain in an empyrean of their own, even if
that atmosphere be purer, wiser, and better than the world below ;
but, as unfortunately it is the tendency of all exclusiveness of
this kind to generate a very different kind of atmosphere, there
is the double peril of the injury to the order and the damage to
the individuals. It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say, that
such a society as the Misses Berry established and maintained for
nearly half a century—bringing together on a common ground of
friendly intercourse, not only men illustrious in different walks of
life, but what might aptly be called the men of the day—men
who had won and men who were winning, men who wished to
learn and men ready to teach, restrained and softened by a
womanly influence that never degenerated into that social
police which a less skilful hostess often finds necessary to
impose—had its moral and political bearings, besides its personal
and superficial influences.
This then is the real meaning and right of such persons to re
spect and remembrance. The inexplicable Sympathies underlie
all hnman association and are the foundation of the civil order of
the world. That men should care for one another at all, thought
Mohammed, is always a mystery; and it is just in proportion
that