cause it
expressed the double offense of being aristocratic, and being
outlandish. We were aristocrats, and it was in vain to deny it; could we
deny our boots? while our antagonists, if not absolutely _sans
culottes_, were slovenly and forlorn in their dress, often unwashed,
with hair totally neglected, and always covered with flakes of cotton.
Jacobins they were, not by any sympathy with the French Jacobinism, that
then desolated western Europe; for, on the contrary, they detested every
thing French, and answered with brotherly signals to the cry of "Church
and king," or, "King and constitution." But, for all that, as they were
perfectly independent, getting very high wages, and in a mode of
industry that was then taking vast strides ahead, they contrived to
reconcile this patriotic anti-Jacobinism with a personal Jacobinism of
that sort which is native to the heart of man, who is by natural impulse
(and not without a root of nobility) impatient of inequality, and
submits to it only through a sense of its necessity, or a long
experience of its benefits.

It was on an early day of our new _tyrocinium_, or, perhaps, on the very
first, that, as we passed the bridge, a boy happening to issue from the
factory,[15] sang out to us, derisively--"Holloa, bucks!" In this the
reader may fail to perceive any atrocious insult commensurate to the
long war which followed. But the reader is wrong. The word "_dandies_,"
which was what the villain meant, had not then been born, so that he
could not have called us by that name, unless through the spirit of
prophecy. _Buck_ was the nearest word at hand in his Manchester
vocabulary; he gave all he could, and let us dream the rest. But, in the
next moment, he discovered our boots, and he completed his crime by
saluting us as "Boots! boots!" My brother made a dead stop, surveyed him
with intense disdain, and bade him draw near, that he might "give his
flesh to the fowls of the air." The boy declined to accept this liberal
invitation, and conveyed his answer by a most contemptuous and plebeian
gesture, upon which my brother drove him in with a shower of stones.

During this inaugural flourish of hostilities, I, for my part, remained
inactive, and, therefore, apparently neutral. But this was the last time
that I did so: for the moment, I was taken by surprise. To be called a
_buck_ by one that had it in his choice to have called me a coward, a
thief, or a murderer, struck me as a most pardona