rangues were an odd jumble of logic and mechanics, of the statutes at large and Joe Miller jests, of stern principle and sly humour, of shrewdness and absurdity, of method and madness. What is more extraordinary, he was an honest man. He was out of his place in the House of Lords. He particularly delighted, in his eccentric onsets, to make havoc of the bench of bishops. "I like," said he, "to argue with one of my lords the bishops; and the reason why I do so is, that I generally have the best of the argument." He was altogether a different man from Lord Eldon; yet his lordship "gave him good œillades," as he broke a jest, or argued a moot-point; and while he spoke, smiles, roguish twinkles, glittered in the Chancellor's eyes.

The look of the gentleman, "the nobleman look," is little else than the reflection of the looks of the world. We smile at those who smile upon us : we are gracious to those who pay their court to us: we naturally acquire confidence and ease when all goes well with us, when we are encouraged by the blandishments of fortune, and the good opinion of mankind. A whole street bowing regularly to a man every time he rides out, may teach him how to pull off his hat in return, without supposing a particular genius for bowing (more than for governing or any thing else) born in the family. It has been observed that persons who sit for their pictures improve the character of their countenances, from the desire they have to procure the most favorable representation of themselves. "Tell me, pray good Mr. Carmine, when you come to the eyes, that I may call up a look," says the Alderman's wife, in Foote's farce of Taste. Ladies grow handsome by looking at themselves in the glass, and heightening the agreeable air and expression of features they so much admire there. So the favourites of fortune adjust themselves in the glass of fashion and the flattering illusions of public opinion. Again, the expression of face in the gentleman, or thorough-bred man of the world, is not that of refinement so much as of flexibility; of sensibility or enthusiasm, so much as of indifference :—it argues presence of mind, rather than enlargement of ideas. In this it differs from the heroic and philosophical look. Instead of an intense unity of purpose, wound up to some great occasion, it is dissipated and frittered down into a number of evanescent expres.

sions, fitted for every variety of unimportant occurrences: instead of the expansion of general thought or intellect, you trace chiefly the little, trite, cautious, moveable lines of conscious, but concealed self-complacency. If Raphael had painted St. Paul as a gentleman, what a figure he would have made of the great Apostle of the Gentiles-occupied with himself, not carried away, raised, inspired with his subject-insinuating his doctrines into his audience, not launching them from him with the tongues of the Holy Spirit, and with looks of fiery, scorching zeal! Gentlemen luckily can afford to sit for their own portraits: painters do not trouble them to sit as studies for history. What a difference is there in this respect between a Madonna of Raphael, and a lady of fashion, even by Vandyke: the former refined and elevated, the latter light and trifling, with no emanation of soul, no depth of feeling, each arch expression playing on the surface, and passing into any other at pleasure,―no one thought having its full scope, but checked by some other,-soft, careless, insincere, pleased, affected, amiable! The French physiognomy is more cut up and subdivided into petty lines and sharp angles than any other: it does not want for subtlety, or an air of gentility, which last it often has in a remarkable degree,--but it is the most unpoetical and the least picturesque of all others. I cannot explain what I mean by this variable telegraphic machinery of polite expression better than by an obvious allusion. Every one by walking the streets of London (or any other populous city) acquires a walk which is easily distinguished from that of strangers; a quick flexibility of movement, a smart jerk, an aspiring and confident tread, and an air as if on the alert to keep the line of march; but for all that, there is not much grace or grandeur in this local strut: you see the person is not a country-bumpkin, but you would not say, he is a hero or a sage-because he is a cockney. So it is in passing through the artificial and thickly peopled scenes of life. You get the look of a man of the world: you rub off the pedant and the clown; but you do not make much progress in wisdom or virtue, or in the characteristic expression of either.

The cha acter of a gentleman (1 take it) may be explained nearly thus-A blackguard (un vaurien) is a fellow who does

not care whom he offends :-a clown is a blockhead who does not know when he offends:-a gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them. Politeness and the pretension to the character in question have reference almost entirely to this reciprocal manifestation of good-will and good opinion towards each other in casual society. Morality regulates our sentiments and conduct as they have a connection with ultimate and important consequences :-manners, properly speaking, regulate our words and actions in the routine of personal intercourse. They have little to do with real kindness of intention, or practical services, or disinterested sacrifices; but they put on the garb, and mock the appearance of these, in order to prevent a breach of the peace, and to smooth and varnish over the discordant materials, when any number of individuals are brought in contact together. The conventional compact of good manners does not reach beyond the moment and the company. Say, for instance, that the rabble, the labouring and industrious part of the community, are taken up with supplying their own wants, and pining over their own hardships-scrambling for what they can get, and not refining on any of their pleasures, or troubling themselves about the fastidious pretensions of others: again, there are philosophers who are busied in the pursuit of truth, or patriots who are active for the good of their country; but here, we will suppose, are a knot of people got together, who, having no serious wants of their own, with leisure and independence, and caring little about abstract truth or practical utility, are met for no mortal purpose but to say and to do all manner of obliging things, to pay the greatest possible respect, and show the most delicate and flattering attentions to one another. The politest set of gentlemen and ladies in the world can do no more than this. The laws that regulate this species of select and fantastic society are comformable to its ends and origin. The fine gentleman or lady must not, on any account, say a rude thing to the persons present, but may turn them into the utmost ridicule the instant they are gone: nay, not to do so is sometimes considered as an indirect slight to the party that remains. You must compliment your bitterest foe to his face, and may slander your dearest friend

2-PART II.

behind his back. The last may be immoral, but it is not unmannerly. The gallant maintains his title to this character by treating every woman he meets with the same marked and unremitting attention as if she was his mistress: the courtier treats every man with the same professions of esteem and kindness as if he were an accomplice with him in some plot against mankind. Of course, these professions, made only to please, go for nothing in practice. To insist on them afterwards as literal obligations, would be to betray an ignorance of this kind of interlude or masquerading in real life. To ruin your friend at play is not inconsistent with the character of a gentleman and a man of honour, if it is done with civility; though to warn him of his danger, so as to imply a doubt of his judgment, or interference with his will, would be to subject yourself to be run through the body with a sword. It is that which wounds the self-love of the indi. vidual that is offensive-that which flatters it that is welcome-however salutary the one, or however fatal the other may be. A habit of plain-speaking is totally contrary to the tone of good. breeding. You must prefer the opinion of the company to your own, and even to truth. I doubt whether a gentleman must not be of the Established Church, and a Tory. A true cavalier can only be a martyr to prejudice or fashion. A Whig lord appears to me as great an anomaly as a patriot king. A sectary is sour and unsociable. A philosopher is quite out of the question. He is in the clouds, and had better not be let down on the floor in a basket, to play the blockhead. He is sure to commit himself in good company-and by dealing always in abstractions, and driving at generalities, to offend against the three proprieties of time, place, and person. Authors are angry, loud, and vehement in argument: the man of more refined bree ling, who has been "all tranquillity and smiles," goes away, and tries to ruin the antagonist whom he could not vanquish in a dispute. The manners of a court and of a polished life are by no means downright, straight forward, but the contrary. They have something dramatic in them; each person plays an assumed part; the af fected, overstrained politeness and suppression of real sentiment lead to concealed irony and a spirit of satire and raillery; and

hence we may account for the perfection of the genteel comedy of the century before the last, when poets were allowed to mingle in the court-circles, and took their cue from the splendid ring

"Of mimic statesmen and their merry king."

The essence of this sort of conversation and intercourse, both on and off the stage, has somehow since evaporated; the disguises of royalty, nobility, gentry, have been in some measure seen through we have become individually of little importance, compared with greater objects, in the eyes of our neighbours, and even in our own: abstract topics, not personal pretensions, are the order of the day; so that what remains of the character we have been talking of, is chiefly exotic and provincial, and may be seen still flourishing in country-places, in a wholesome state of vegetable decay!

A man may have the manners of a gentleman without having the look, and he may have the character of a gentleman, in a more abstracted point of view, without the manners. The feelings of a gentleman, in this higher sense, only denote a more refined humanity—a spirit delicate in itself, and unwilling to offend, either in the greatest or the smallest things. This may be coupled with absence of mind, with ignorance of forms, and frequent blunders. But the will is good. The spring of gentle offices and true regards is untainted. A person of this stamp blushes at an impropriety he was guilty of twenty years before, though he is, perhaps, liable to repeat it to-morrow. He never forgives himself for even a slip of the tongue, that implies an assumption of superiority over any one. In proportion to the concessions made to him, he lowers his demands. He gives the wall to a beggar:* but does not always bow to great men. This

The writer of this Essay once saw a Prince of the Blood pull off his hat to every one in the street, till he came to the beggarman that swept the crossing. This was a nice distinction. Farther, it was a distinction that the writer of this Essay would not make to be a Prince of the Blood. Perhaps, however, a question might be started in the manner of Montaigne, whether the beggar did not pull off his hat in quality of asking charity, and not as a mark of respect Now a prince may decline giving charity, though he is obliged to