When we meet Bertie, he is impersonating a gentleman's gentleman while Jeeves – enjoying his tenancy of Bertie's best dressing gown – is impersonating that gentleman's gentleman's gentleman (which gentleman, to confuse things further, is not B Wooster).
This was a world in which gentleman amateurs could indulge what Hume described as "the effeminate part of mee" (his love of music) through dances and laments for two or three viols.
They were the apogee of a long phase during which Gentleman not only kept step with an optimistic consensus rhetoric about Britain, invoking its rich past together with its progressive future: he supplied that consensus with a face.
"I believe I have some knowledge which you gentlemen should have," wrote the woman from Auckland.
Their next and more considerable problem, however, is to cope with the young ladies' devastating wit, through means of which the gentlemen are thoroughly put down.
Unyielding forests, soggy fields, poor harvests and epidemics created a situation in which landowning gentlemen, desperate to maintain honor, could slip into debt, despair, sin, ruin.
Bill Clinton came to George Plimpton's house on a very hot night last week to attend a party for the new book "The Games We Played," to which both gentlemen contributed chapters.
However, Mr Cameron appeared to flout the club's dress code, which stipulates "Gentlemen are required to wear a suit and collared shirt as well as a tie at dinner", appearing in an open necked shirt.
Which means, gentlemen, that it's no longer acceptable to have a laissez-faire attitude to shoes; like it or not, they say a great deal about the kind of man you really are.
