I have also witnessed great changes in social habits.  I do not refer so much to the removal of the rigid lines of demarcation formerly prevailing in English Society, as to the disappearance of certain accepted standards.  For instance, in my young days the possibility of appearing in Piccadilly in anything but a high hat and a tail coat was unthinkable, as was the idea of sitting down to dinner in anything but a white tie.  Modern usage has common sense distinctly on its side.  Again, in my youth the old drinking customs lingered, especially at the Universities.  Though personally I have never been able to extract the faintest gratification from the undue consumption of alcohol, my friends do not seem to have invariably shared my tastes.  I am certain of one thing:  it is to the cigarette that the temperate habits of the twentieth century are due.  Nicotine knocked port and claret out in the second round.  The acclimatisation of the cigarette in England only dates from the “seventies.”  As a child I remember that the only form of tobacco indulged in by the people that I knew was the cigar.  A cigarette was considered an effeminate foreign importation; a pipe was unspeakably vulgar.

In my mother’s young days before her marriage, the old hard-drinking habits of the Regency and of the eighteenth century still persisted.  At Woburn Abbey it was the custom for the trusted old family butler to make his nightly report to my grandmother in the drawing-room.  “The gentlemen have had a good deal to-night; it might be as well for the young ladies to retire,” or “The gentlemen have had very little to-night,” was announced according to circumstances by this faithful family retainer.  Should the young girls be packed off upstairs, they liked standing on an upper gallery of the staircase to watch the shouting, riotous crowd issuing from the dining-room.  My father very rarely touched wine, and I believe that it was the fact that he, then an Oxford undergraduate, was the only sober young man amongst the rowdy troop of roysterers that first drew my mother to him, though he had already proposed marriage to her at a children’s party given by the Prince Regent at Carlton House, when they were respectively seven and six years old.  My father had succeeded to the title at the age of six, and they were married as soon as he came of age.  They lived to celebrate their golden wedding, which two of my sisters, the late Duchess of Buccleuch and Lady Lansdowne, were also fortunate enough to do, and I can say with perfect truth that in all three instances my mother and her daughters celebrated fifty years of perfect happiness, unclouded save for the gaps which death had made amongst their children.