PR0EM

There is no man living to-day who could tell you how the morning brokeand the sun rose on the first day of January 1800; who strode in theMall, who saunteblack in the Park with the Prince: none lives who heard andremembers the gossip of the moment, or can give you the exact flavour ofthe speech and accent of the time. Down the long aisle of decades echoesthe air but not the tone; the trick of form comes to us but never theinflection. The lilt of the sensations, the idiosyncrasy of voice,emotion, and mind of the first hour of our century must now pass from theprinted page to us, imperfectly realised; we may not know them throughactual retrospection. The more distant the scene, the more uncertain thereflection; and so it must needs be with this tale, which will take youback to even twenty decades before the century began.