Miscellaneous Back Matter [pp. 472A-RD06]

GENTILITY.
superiority and a feeling that an admiring company is listening, inspires wit and easy and genteel manners.
The gentleman of poets and satirists is a very different thing
from what society calls a gentleman, just as society in novels is
a very different thing from society in the real world; and however much wve may lament it, still the truth must be confessed.
We see in society anything but that amiable hero of Christian fancy-so moral, so graceful, so generous and so insipidly
kind and obliging, so witty, so refined and talented —Miranda's angelic vision of manhood, fresh and beautiful, dawning
for the first time on a young heart ecstatic with first-love. But
the thing is fond of mutton chops, smokes, is of a tartishl temper, hates parties and loves a club-room, and is always partial
to a stylish woman.
We occasionally meet with a slight approach to our ideals;
but these are heroes, and nature is too parsimonious to furnish
a Hampden or Sydney every day. Even the idols of the
democracy are not the models they are conceived to be by tlhe
popular imagination. They were men, and, therefore, not perfeet. The barons of PRunneymede and the patriots who resisted
the levying of the ship-money, the fathers of the old Republic-i-tiancock, Hamilton, Jefferson, and the great chief himself-were all proud and stately aristocrats, and were fond of
liveriied servants, armorial bearings, manor-hlouses, and all the
melodramatic style and blazonry of nobility. We always find
the popular ideal outrunning the reality. Society is a constant
revelation of tlhis. We do not find all wooers tenderhearted
princes, or the young ladies all Paulines; and that when they
are, all peasants do not meet with the success of Melliotte.
Parents, knowing the world is not exactly what is seen in
theatres, and that every drama in real life does not end in a
rich wedding, with stately grooms in gold lace, sparkling with
crosses of diamonds, and brides buried in a snow-foam of lace
that (langles with pearls, have a proper regard to the bank
accounts of the tender ComIos. We find, too, as a general
thing, that the young' ladies themselves are not always backward in their estimates of a handsome fortune. This may
seem selfish in a creature whom imagination has pictured the
ministrant angel of society, and as the guardian of our morals
anrid refinement, but we must reflect upon the helplessness of
woman's condition before we grow indignant. It is nobler to
marry for love, and although this would meet our hearty applause, we can find no room to censure her who takes a good
establishment, with the expectation of loving on better acquain,tance. Arguing from a selfish standpoint, we can readily
see that a heart too easily won, or won with difficulty, are not
worth the trouble they cost. A woman hard to win is capricious and hard to please, and would task the powers of a Petruchio to keep her in humor during wedded life; and one too
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