In Dublin there is positively good company, and positively bad; but not, as in London, many degrees of comparison: not innumerable luminaries of the polite world, moving in different orbits of fashion, but all the bright planets of note and name move and revolve in the same narrow limits.

Lord Colambre did not find that either his father's or his mother's representations of society in Dublin resembled the reality, which he now beheld.

Lady Clonbrony had, in terms of detestation, described Dublin such as it appeared to her soon after the Union; Lord Clonbrony had painted it with convivial enthusiasm, such as he saw it long and long before the Union, when FIRST he drank claret at the fashionable clubs.

This picture, unchanged in his memory, and unchangeable by his imagination, had remained, and ever would remain, the same.

The hospitality of which the father boasted, the son found in all its warmth, but meliorated and refined; less convivial, more social; the fashion of hospitality had improved.