e in affection, and your attempt
to teach her a failure in respect. This feeling in women is far from
being wholly egoistic. They refer everything to persons, but not
necessarily to their own persons. Whatever you affirm as a fact, they
find means of interpreting as loyalty or disloyalty to some person whom
they either venerate or love, to the head of religion, or of the State,
or of the family. Hence it is always dangerous to enter upon
intellectual discussion of any kind with women, for you are almost
certain to offend them by setting aside the sentiments of veneration,
affection, love, which they have in great strength, in order to reach
accuracy in matters of fact, which they neither have nor care for.

PART VIII.

_ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY._

LETTER I.

TO A YOUNG ENGLISH NOBLEMAN.

A contrast--A poor student--His sad fate--Class-sentiment--Tycho
Brahe--Robert Burns--Shelley's opinion of Byron--Charles
Dickens--Shopkeepers in English literature--Pride of aristocratic
ignorance--Pursuits tabooed by the spirit of caste--Affected
preferences in intellectual pursuits--Studies that add to
gentility--Sincerity of interest needed for genuine culture--The
exclusiveness of scholarly caste--Its bad influence on
outsiders--Feeling of Burns toward scholars--Sureness of
class-instinct--Unforeseen effect of railways--Return to nomadic life
and the chase--Advantages and possibilities to life in the higher
classes.

It is one of the privileges of authorship to have correspondents in the
most widely different positions, and by means of their frank and
friendly letters (usually much more frank than any oral communication)
to gain a singularly accurate insight into the working of circumstances
on the human intellect and character. The same post that brought me your
last letter brought news about another of my friends whose lot has been
a striking contrast to your own.[8]

Let me dwell upon this contrast for a few minutes. All the sunshine
appears to have been on your side, and all the shadow on his. Born of
highly cultivated parents, in the highest rank in England under royalty,
you have lived from the beginning amongst the most efficient aids to
culture, and Nature has so endowed you that, instead of becoming
indifferent to these things from familiarity, you have learned to value
them more and more in every successive year. The plainest statement of
your advantages would sound like an extract