rprise, for genteel is heathenish. Ideas of barbaric pearl and gold,
glittering armour, plumes, tortures, blood-shedding, and lust, should
always be connected with it, Wace, in his grand Norman poem, calls the
Baron genteel:--

"La furent li gentil Baron," etc.

And he certainly could not have applied the word better than to the
strong Norman thief, armed cap-a-pie, without one particle of ruth or
generosity; for a person to be a pink of gentility, that is heathenism,
should have no such feelings; and, indeed, the admirers of gentility
seldom or never associate any such feelings with it. It was from the
Norman, the worst of all robbers and miscreants, who built strong
castles, garrisoned them with devils, and tore out poor wretches' eyes,
as the Saxon Chronicle says, that the English got their detestable word
genteel. What could ever have made the English such admirers of
gentility, it would be difficult to say, for, during three hundred years,
they suffered enough by it. Their genteel Norman landlords were their
scourgers, their torturers, the plunderers of their homes, the
dishonourers of their wives, and the deflowerers of their daughters.
Perhaps, after all, fear is at the root of the English veneration for
gentility.

{316} Gentle and gentlemanly may be derived from the same root as
genteel; but nothing can be more distinct from the mere genteel, than the
ideas which enlightened minds associate with these words. Gentle and
gentlemanly mean something kind and genial; genteel, that which is
glittering or gaudy. A person can be a gentleman in rags, but nobody can
be genteel.

{332} The writer has been checked in print by the Scotch with being a
Norfolk man. Surely, surely, these latter times have not been exactly
the ones in which it was expedient for Scotchmen to check the children of
any county in England with the place of their birth, more especially
those who have had the honour of being born in Norfolk--times in which
British fleets, commanded by Scotchmen, have returned laden with anything
but laurels from foreign shores. It would have been well for Britain had
she had the old Norfolk man to despatch to the Baltic or the Black Sea
lately, instead of Scotch admirals.

{351} As the present work will come out in the midst of a vehement
political contest, people may be led to suppose that the above was
written expressly for the time. The writer therefore begs to state that
it was written in the