lord hollow!” The mechanic of the borough town, who sees him dashing through the streets in an open landau, drawn by four milk-white horses, amidst his attendant out-riders; his wife, a monster of a woman, by his side, stout as the wife of Tamerlane, who weighed twenty stone, and bedizened out like her whose person shone with the jewels of plundered Persia, stares with silent wonder, and at last exclaims “That’s the man for my vote!” You tell the clown that the man of the mansion has contributed enormously to corrupt the rural innocence of England; you point to an incipient branch railroad, from around which the accents of Gomorrah are sounding, and beg him to listen for a moment, and then close his ears.  Hodge scratches his head and says, “Well, I have nothing to say to that; all I know is, that he is bang up, and I wish I were he;” perhaps he will add--a Hodge has been known to add—­“He has been kind enough to put my son on that very railroad; ’tis true the company is somewhat queer, and the work rather killing, but he gets there half-a-crown a day, whereas from the farmers he would only get eighteen-pence.”  You remind the mechanic that the man in the landau has been the ruin of thousands and you mention people whom he himself knows, people in various grades of life, widows and orphans amongst them, whose little all has been dissipated, and whom he has reduced to beggary by inducing them to become sharers in his delusive schemes.  But the mechanic says, “Well, the more fools they to let themselves be robbed.  But I don’t call that kind of thing robbery, I merely call it out-witting; and everybody in this free country has a right to outwit others if he can.  What a turn-out he has!” One was once heard to add, “I never saw a more genteel-looking man in all my life except one, and that was a gentleman’s walley, who was much like him.  It is true that he is rather under-sized, but then madam, you know, makes up for all.”

CHAPTER V

Subject of Gentility continued.

In the last chapter have been exhibited specimens of gentility, so considered by different classes; by one class power, youth, and epaulets are considered the ne plus ultra of gentility; by another class pride, stateliness, and title; by another, wealth and flaming tawdriness.  But what constitutes a gentleman?  It is easy to say at once what constitutes a gentleman, and there are no distinctions in what is gentlemanly, {5} as there are in what is genteel.  The characteristics of a gentleman are high feeling—­a determination never to take a cowardly advantage of another—­a liberal education--absence of narrow views—­generosity and courage, propriety of behaviour.  Now a person may be genteel according to one or another of the three standards described above, and not possess one of the characteristics of a gentleman.  Is the emperor a gentleman, with spatters of blood on his clothes, scourged from the backs of noble Hungarian