choice of wine, whether port, sherry, claret, or
madeira—and the reply surely amounts to a
conversation? What glittering scenes of splendour
they are admitted to! What ravishing beauty
they may look on! They, indeed, go out to
balls, dinners, and parties, as much as the most
fashionable. No wonder that everything else—
trade, labour, and even that final haven of
public-house proprietorship—should be more or
less insipid. By a little fiction they may hold
themselves as much invited as the guests. And,
let it be added, that, without impeachment of
guilt, there are certain tithings, in the way
of meats and drinks of the choicest sort, to
which they are fairly entitled, provided they
be taken with delicacy and moderation. There
are remnants and surplusages which no host
can grudge them, possibly, because there can be
no restraint of any practical value. But his
must be a low coarse mind that can bring
disgrace upon his order by flagrant and helpless
intoxication. The emoluments, too, are
certainly opulent, not to say luxurious. Many a
gentleman that is in good practice receives
several retainers for the one night, and with
good hands such divided service has its value.
Money is put by; and after very few years the
cherished goal is reached, and the longed-for
"public" opened. This, the longed-for Bar, is
what the Bench would be for a member of the
other profession.

In contrast to occasional and transient service,
who does not know the family treasure, the pearl
of price, the faithful retainer, who has been in
the family, "man and boy, nigh forty year"—
in short, the old servant? Such come very
dramatically on the stage; there they are
accustomed at seasons of family pressure to bring out
their "little hoards," their life's savings, and
with a "It ain't much, miss, but, such as it is,
you are welcome to it," press their assistance
on the young daughter of the family. This is
the theatrical view: but some of these ancient
retainers have their inconveniences. They are
the true old men of the sea—never to be parted
with save under conditions of a handsome
pension, whose amount is an indignity and cause of
injury. Their redeeming merit is a strict
honesty; they will not wrong you in what they
call "a pin's point." But they are more passive
where others are concerned. They think
something is due to the credit of the house, and
rather stand up for all impositions. They keep
us in a decent bondage, the ladies in a sort
of terrorism; and grave consultations have to
be held, and mutual support conceded, before
"John" or "William" can be asked to go out
on some message, or worse, have the news
broken to him that Mr. and Mrs. Brown are
coming to dinner. Dinners, teas, messages, are
all so many synonyms for trouble. The face
of the ancient retainer, as he opens the hall
door to admit some new modern "notion"
—say a fern case, carried in by two men—is
worth studying, bearing an expression
compounded of disgust, wonder, contempt, and
anger. He looks after the object with a
muttered "Well, well! after that! Now this ends
it!" As for the "Rooshian" system as applied
to dinners, that "goes beyond the beyonds." In
his eyes, it is next to sitting down like the
savages, and pulling the meat with our fingers.
The idea of a dinner that is no dinner, a table
with nothing to eat upon it! That in its own
way was going beyond the beyonds. But when
the retainer gets sick and is prostrated and near
his end, as he, but no one else, thinks; when he
moans and crones over himself, and more than
hints in faltering accents that it is the overwork
of the cruel family who have brought him to
this sore pass, but whom he forgives, with a
"No matter now" dating it all from the night
of the party, when all that weary, "weary work"
was laid on his back. Everything is on his back.
It is we who are in the service of these
"treasures," not they in ours.

They do not consider, too, how often they
bring us to shame by their free-and-easy
bearing, their volunteer conversations at the hall
door. With persons of condition and acute
observation they talk on perfect equality. It was
an old Irish retainer who was on duty in the
hall of, of course, an Irish family, on the night
of a party, and called after some of the company
who were going in a wrong direction to take
off their cloaks, &c.: "Come back, will ye!
Come back, I say. It's in here yee's to sthrip."
And yet, take them for all in all, with all their
failings and blemishes, and the slavery into
which they sell us—still after a line of monsters,
who drink and steal, or are impudent,
or quarrelsome, or idle, the eye looks back
wistfully to the honest imperfections of the "old
retainer." Between them both there is not
much to choose. Yet the absence of vices is a
recommendation .

Still it is always good to see masters and
servants grow old together; even better to see
hereditary service kept up—where there is a
lineage of service in the servants' halls as well
as a lineage recorded in Burke, where the son
of the late Sir John's old butler ministers to
Sir John's successor. It is in such houses that
every kind of menial office is best performed.
Such families have their systems and traditions,
in which there are traditions of service that
cause every new servant, when new servants
are required, to fall into the ways of the house
—ways of too old growth, and too firmly
established, to be lightly thrown out of order. To
govern a large establishment well requires an
education, just as much as teaching and training
are required to make efficient servants.

A good servant is a pearl of great price, and
yet, somehow, there are few who would like to
have Mr. Joseph Andrews for their footman.
The notion of a pious man-servant is, somehow,
offensive, possibly from a suspicion of insincerity,
though this seems a rather harsh idea. A
more reasonable explanation is the perpetual
reminder of our own inferiority to one, who should
be inferior in all things, even in piety. We
have a sneaking preference for the man who had
no objection to attend family prayer, but hoped