fair capital of manners to
begin with.

Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an
overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our
generic humanity. It is just here that the very highest society asserts
its superior breeding. Among truly elegant people of the highest ton,
you will find more real equality in social intercourse than in a country
village. As nuns drop their birth-names and become Sister Margaret and
Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop their personal distinctions and
become brothers and sisters of conversational charity. Nor are
fashionable people without their heroism. I believe there are men who
have shown as much self-devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to
the supper-table as ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized
his name. There are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing
can hold back from their errands of mercy. They find out the red-handed,
gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his
corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the green
herb. They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary apparition saddens
the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-room. I have known one
of these angels ask, of her own accord, that a desolate middle-aged man,
whom nobody seemed to know, should be presented to her by the hostess.
He wore no shirt-collar,--he had on black gloves,--and was flourishing a
red bandanna handkerchief! Match me this, ye proud children of poverty,
who boast of your paltry sacrifices for each other! Virtue in humble
life! What is that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in
pearls and diamonds? As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before
the social mendicant,--the white billows of her beauty heaving under the
foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them,--I should have wept
with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private
demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness and
vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.

I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which political
chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of our
fellow-citizens. It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always been
what might be called in general terms a gentleman. But what if at some
future time the choice of the people shoul