| <The Saturday Review May 30, 1863>
| <Heir Hunting>
| <pb n="690">
| The sufferings which people who have anything that 
| can be dunned out of them by importunity are 
| condemned to undergo at the hands of those who are 
| impudent enough to dun them, have long been the 
| subject of general commiseration.  The system of 
| Competitive Examination is believed to owe its origin 
| chiefly to the anxiety of statesmen to rid themselves 
| of the intolerable throng of applicants who were 
| gathered round them by the hopes of patronage.  The 
| Mendacity Society owes its existence to the absolute 
| necessity of providing some protection against the 
| swarm of beggars whom the merest rumour will draw 
| round any man who has had the weakness to be guilty 
| of an act of benevolence.  It is said that a 
| distinguished philanthropist, who has had the 
| misfortune to make his name famous by an act of 
| singular munificence, has been fairly driven into a 
| foreign country by the levee of piteous cases that has 
| taken to assembling round his street door.  There are 
| better-dressed beggars also, who do not beg less 
| valiantly, though it is for other things.  The great 
| people who have the reputation of giving agreeable or 
| splendid parties are severe sufferers from the 
| imperturbable assurance with which those who are 
| labouring up the lower rounds of the fashionable 
| ladder petition for a card.  But of all the sufferers of 
| this kind, there is no set of people so deserving of pity 
| as elder sons.  The mendicants by whom they are 
| beset are not of the outcast class, who can be got rid 
| of by an appeal to a police magistrate or a mendacity 
| officer; nor is the favour for which they are 
| importuned a very small matter.  Turbaned dowagers, 
| of awful presence and remorseless tongues, laden 
| with unmarketable daughters, and with the word <p> 
| "Intentions" </p> trembling on their lips, are the 
| lazzaroni by whom their footsteps are dogged; and, 
| like their Neapolitan prototypes, these persecutors are 
| always ready to turn to and abuse their victim if he 
| refuses them the trifling dole of title and estates for 
| which they are asking.
| Happily for themselves, the hunted animals in 
| question are comparatively rare.  London ball-rooms 
| and country-houses are the spots in which their 
| persecutors generally find them; but, like the Alpine 
| chamois, excessive hunting has made them scarce in 
| their ancient haunts.  They survive, however, in 
| sufficient numbers to enable a careful observer to 
| watch their habits in every stage of their troubled 
| existence.  The change that comes over them in the 
| course of it is both striking and melancholy.  The 
| length of time during which any one of them has been 
| the object for which some dowager has spread her 
| toils may in general be inferred from the extent of 
| timidity and caution he displays.  On his first entrance 
| into society the elder son is cheerful, conversable, and 
| trustful in his manner.  He betrays no consciousness 
| that his every gesture is watched, or that every phrase 
| that falls from him is carefully analysed, to find 
| whether a latent or embryo proposal can be detected 
| in its composition.  He does not even know his 
| enemies as yet.  He will talk and laugh with a 
| dowager, and listen to her compliments, and accept 
| her invitations, and will speak of her to his friends as 
| though she were nothing else to him but a rather ugly 
| old woman, with a large development of skirt and 
| head-dress.  But the great sign that an elder son is still 
| enjoying the bliss of youthful ignorance is the ease 
| and composure with which he practises the manly 
| accomplishment of flirting.  He will plunge into a 
| family of maiden daughters, if pheasants should lead 
| him there, without a tinge of fear.  He will sit by a 
| young lady at dinner, if chance should thrust him into 
| such a position, and his appetite will never be blunted 
| by a thought upon the dangers that surround him.  
| Nay, he will devote himself to her all the evening, 
| will bank with her at the round game, and turn over 
| her leaves at the pianoforte; and at the end of it all, he 
| will hand a candle to her mother, without a suspicion 
| that those maternal eyes are already glancing at him 
| that question about <p> "Intentions" </p> which in a 
| few days will send him a scared and breathless 
| fugitive from the hall-door.  Very different is the 
| bearing of the elder son who has learnt wisdom in the 
| bitter school of experience.  He no longer ventures 
| willingly into danger.  After a score of hairbreadth 
| escapes, like the partridges in November, he is 
| decidedly wild.  He is mentally scarred all over with 
| the wounds he has received.  Good-natured friends 
| have confided to him more than once that Lady 
| So-and-So is saying all over London that <p> "he has 
| behaved infamously;" </p> and his manner shows 
| that he is no longer insensible to the constructions 
| which may be placed on the ordinary politenesses 
| which are only practiced with impunity by younger 
| sons.  Something of his former self still remains to 
| him as long as only married women are in the room.  
| He speaks and laughs at his ease, sits down wherever 
| he is inclined, and does not shrink even from a 
| <hi rend="italic"> tete-a-tete. </hi>  But the moment the 
| form of a marriageable female darkens the doorway, a 
| cloud comes over him.  If he can, he flees from the 
| open plain by the fire, and hides himself in distant 
| corners or behind impregnable writing tables.  If he 
| cannot make his escape to a place of security, he 
| throws himself upon the defensive by making hard 
| love to the nearest married lady, or by taking a sudden 
| but absorbing interest in the agricultural prospects of 
| a country neighbour.  Sometimes hard fate forces him 
| to sit through a whole meal next to the object of his 
| terrors, and then it is very pretty to watch his coy and 
| maidenly embarrassment.  He is evidently puzzling 
| himself the whole time how to draw the narrow and 
| imperceptible line which, in the case of elder sons, 
| separates rudeness from love-making.  He is 
| calculating how many observations upon the weather 
| it will be safe to make, and whether he can dare to 
| desert that innocent subject of criticism without 
| exposing himself to the risk of being supposed to 
| have <p> "behaved infamously" </p> six months 
| hence.  His manner becomes very like that of a 
| witness who has been put forward to prove an alibi, 
| and is undergoing a severe cross-examination.  At last, 
| of course, he attains to a wonderful dexterity in the 
| use of a glacial politeness, in which nothing 
| matrimonial can be scented even by the keenest 
| dowager nose.  It is not all elder sons, however, who 
| attain to this conversational agility.  Many are taken 
| in the process of learning how to elude their pursuers.    
| In spite of all his care, many a one finds himself at 
| last undergoing that dreaded interview in which the 
| dexterous dowager drives in her last harpoon, by 
| telling him in a broken voice, from behind her 
| pocket-handkerchief, that she fears her dear daughter's 
| peace of mind is gone for ever.  Conscious of their 
| weakness, the elder sons seldom run too close to 
| danger.  They prefer to flock together out of its reach.  
| Just as a shoal of herrings indicates the 
| neighbourhood of a dog-fish, and as the terror among 
| the small birds betrays the presence of a hawk in the 
| air above, so, if you see a number of elder sons 
| congregated at one end of a breakfast or luncheon 
| table, you may be quite sure there is a young lady at 
| the other.
| After a time, this phase, too, in the elder son's career 
| passes away.  The dowagers whose toils he has 
| constantly eluded give him up in despair at last.  He is 
| beyond the age when he can be expected to believe in 
| the fracture of a young lady's peace of mind; and it is 
| of no use asking for intentions when there are no 
| intentions forthcoming.  Nothing remains of his many 
| hazards and narrow deliverances, but a quarrel with 
| two or three families to whom he is supposed to have 
| behaved infamously.  He has not resumed, however, 
| the unsuspecting gaiety of youth.  He has acquired a 
| precautionary habit of sheering off at the approach of 
| a young lady, to which he probably adheres.  He has 
| also contracted a practice of keeping his hands in his 
| pockets, which has attracted the observation of the 
| naturalists by whom the species has been studied.  
| The reason is supposed by many to be analogous to 
| that which induces the Persians who live in disturbed 
| districts to cut their beards short, in order that their 
| adversaries may have nothing to take hold of.  This 
| explanation, however, requires to be verified.  It is 
| needless to say that, in this advanced stage of 
| elder-sonship, he does not dream of marriage.  To propose 
| it to him would be like proposing amalgamation to 
| Federals and Confederates, or to Poles and Russians.  
| A long course of social hardships and privations has 
| made such an idea abhorrent to him.  The results ~~ at 
| least those results which we can examine without 
| lifting up the veil of our decorous social system ~~ 
| are curious enough, not only with respect to all who 
| are in any degree worth being hunted down.  Refined 
| female society they will, as a rule, have, though they 
| cannot have it in the conversation of young ladies, the 
| greater number of whom are brought up to look on 
| them with a purely commercial eye.  The demand 
| from such a quarter is pretty sure to create a supply; 
| and as the
| <pb n="691">
| young unmarried ladies are shut out by the 
| manoeuvres of their mothers, it must be furnished by 
| those who have removed that disqualification.  
| Snake-charming is a perilous amusement except with snakes 
| whose fangs are drawn.  The arrangement is, no doubt, 
| a very pleasant one for the young men.  Married 
| women are in themselves more practiced, and, 
| therefore, more agreeable talkers than young ladies; 
| and even if they were not, a friendship which does not 
| lead up to a question about intentions is necessarily a 
| very much pleasanter and more comfortable kind of 
| intimacy than one that does.  But it is not to be 
| expected that the prevalence of such a state of things 
| should be free from consequences of a more serious 
| kind upon the morality and the repute of the classes 
| among whom it exists.  For the present, the game 
| appears to go on merrily.  Skating on thin ice is a 
| delightful amusement until the ice breaks ~~ and, 
| perhaps, for some time after.  But if the pastime 
| should result in extensive scandal, no small share of 
| the blame will belong to the dowager-system, and 
| especially to the vigorous practitioners who have 
| pushed it to such a length in our day.