of the miserable
sufferer.

And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer the
one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body. If you can get
along with people who carry a certificate in their faces that their
goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your children
cannot. And whatever offends one of these little ones cannot be right in
the eyes of Him who loved them so well.

After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably select
gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then all will be
right.

This repetition of the above words,--gentleman and lady,--which could not
be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are made of them by
those who ought to know what they mean. Thus, at a marriage ceremony,
once, of two very excellent persons who had been at service, instead of,
Do you take this man, etc.? and, Do you take this woman? how do you think
the officiating clergyman put the questions? It was, Do you, Miss So and
So, take this GENTLEMAN? and, Do you, Mr. This or That, take this LADY?!
What would any English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England herself, have
thought, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her and her
bridegroom anything but plain woman and man at such a time?

I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she
happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered these
monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the ludicrous
surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized upon
many of the persons who were present,--had guessed what a sudden flash of
light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby, perking
pretension belonging to certain social layers,--so inherent in their
whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion cannot exclude
its impertinences,--the good man would have given his marriage-fee twice
over to recall that superb and full-blown vulgarism. Any persons whom it
could please could have no better notion of what the words referred to
signify than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.

MAN! Sir! WOMAN! Sir! Gentility is a fine thing, not to be
undervalued, as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes before
that.

"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"

The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from the
finest training is not to