inciples and manners. To keep it pure is always of the
highest importance, and it is the most difficult, for there a baneful
change is the most apt to take place.

Gentlemen of rank, in all countries, resemble each other very nearly;
not, perhaps, in exterior, because that depends on fashion, which is
arbitrary, but in mind and manners there is less difference than
between men in a second rank of society.

The lower orders, so far as they are forced, by necessity, to labour,
resemble each other also; they are pressed by necessities and passions
on one side, and the desire of rest on the other; and a fair allowance
being made for variety of climate, of circumstances, and of natural
dispositions, there is nothing very different amongst them. {175}

What applies with respect to the higher and lower orders does not

---
{174} Our lawyers (barristers) are probably superior to those of any
other nation, and the clergy are, at least, equal. This is not, indeed,
saying a great deal; but it is so difficult, in matters of religion, to
temper zeal, and draw a line between emulation and fanaticism, that,
perhaps, it is better that they should be a little remiss than righteous
overmuch. It is not in the education of churchmen, but in the manner
of paying and providing for them, that the error lies; and that subject is
treated elsewhere.

{175} Cervantes, in his admirable romance of Don Quixote, paints the
mind of a gentleman, which all countries will acknowledge to be like
the truth. The madness apart, the manner of thinking and acting was
that of the gentleman of Spain, France, Germany, or England. Neither
was he the gentleman of the fifteenth or eighteenth century, but of any
other century. His dress was Spanish; his madness and manners
belonged to the ages of chivalry and romance, but the mind and
principles of the gentleman suited all ages and all countries.

Sancho, again, barring likewise his oddities, is the peasant of all
countries; studying to live as well as he can, and labour as little as he
may. In short, a mind continually occupied about personal wants, and
alive to personal interest. In the middle ranks of society there is no
such similarity.
-=-

[end of page #218]

apply at all to the middling classes, nor even to the most wealthy class
of labourers in a manufacturing country: in those we can find no fixed
character; it is as variable as the circumstances in which the
individuals are placed, and it is ther