d fall upon one on whom that
lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be bestowed? This may
happen,--how soon the future only knows. Think of this miserable man of
coming political possibilities,--an unpresentable boor sucked into office
by one of those eddies in the flow of popular sentiment which carry
straws and chips into the public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of
the monarchs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf
of political oblivion! Think of him, I say, and of the concentrated gaze
of good society through its thousand eyes, all confluent, as it were, in
one great burning-glass of ice that shrivels its wretched object in fiery
torture, itself cold as the glacier of an unsunned cavern! No,--there
will be angels of good-breeding then as now, to shield the victim of free
institutions from himself and from his torturers. I can fancy a lovely
woman playfully withdrawing the knife which he would abuse by making it
an instrument for the conveyance of food,--or, failing in this kind
artifice, sacrificing herself by imitating his use of that implement; how
much harder than to plunge it into her bosom, like Lucretia! I can see
her studying in his provincial dialect until she becomes the Champollion
of New England or Western or Southern barbarisms. She has learned that
haow means what; that think-in' is the same thing as thinking, or she has
found out the meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no
single-tongued phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of
the Hudson and at its embouchure, and elsewhere,--what they say when they
think they say first, (fe-eest,--fe as in the French le),--or that cheer
means chair,--or that urritation means irritation,--and so of other
enormities. Nothing surprises her. The highest breeding, you know,
comes round to the Indian standard,--to take everything coolly,--nil
admirari,--if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for the
same thing.

If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to foot to
see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not grown a little
older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice, or if your
complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then convey the fact to
you, in the style in which the Poor Relation addressed the
divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like. I hate the sight of
the wretches. Don't for mercy's sake think I hate them; the distinc