face the footmarks of nature:--

'I said that I was told that the distinction between noble
and _roturier_ existed in its full force in real life.

'"Yes," said Tocqueville, "it does, meaning by noble,
_gentilhomme_; and it is a great misfortune, since it keeps
up distinctions and animosities of caste; but it is
incurable--at least, it has not been cured, or perhaps much
palliated, by our sixty years of revolution. It is a sort of
Freemasonry. When I talk to a _gentilhomme_, though we have
not two ideas in common, though all his opinions, wishes,
and thoughts are opposed to mine, yet I feel at once that we
belong to the same family, that we speak the same language,
that we understand one another. I may like a bourgeois
better, but he is a stranger." I mentioned the remark to me
of a very sensible Prussian, _buerger_ himself, that it was
unwise to send out as ambassador any not noble. I said it
did not matter in England, where the distinction is unknown.
"Yes," he replied, "unknown with you; but you may be sure
that when any of our _buerger_ ministers meets one who is
_von Adel_, he does not negociate with him on equal terms;
he is always wishing to sneak under the table."'

In these conversations, preserved in a separate series of Senior's
Journals, we have the best, latest, and wisest, of De Tocqueville's
thoughts; none the less valuable, and to English readers all the more
intelligible and impressive, that we have them in undress; put into the
terse, pithy, concentrated style of summarized oral conversation by the
recorder, instead of being elaborately tricked out in all the formal
grace of French literary diction by one of the most fastidious of French
writers. Senior, who habitually wrote down in his Journals the
conversation of the great, wise, and thoughtful--the leaders of
political action or literary criticism, the statesmen and thinkers--with
whom in the course of a leisurely life of social observation he was
brought into intimate intercourse, had a gift of getting from each man
the best he had to give. His friends knew that their table-talk was
recorded, often themselves read and corrected the record, and therefore
gave him what they were willing to give not to the contemporary world,
but to posterity; those opinions upon the current facts of the day by
which they were willing to be judged hereafter. No opini