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 1880

By Max Beerbohm

that there is no one, however optimistic, that has not wished, from time to time, that he had been born into some other age than this. Poor Professor Froude once admitted that he would like to have been a prehistoric man. Don Quixote is only one of many who have tried to revive the days of chivalry. A desire to have lived in the eighteenth century is common to all our second-rate litterateurs. But, for my own part, I have often felt that it would have been nice to live in that bygone epoch when society was first inducted into the mysteries of art and, not losing yet its old and elegant tenue, first babbled of blue china and white lilies, and of the painter Rossetti and of the poet Swinburne. It would have been a fine thing to see the tableaux at Cromwell House or the Pastoral Plays at Coombe Wood, to have strained my eyes for a glimpse of the Jersey Lily, clapped holes in my gloves for Connie Gilchrist, and danced all night long to the strains of the Manola Valse. The period of 1880 must have been delicious.