ations, as the act of
rising from a sedentary posture for the purpose of expressing respect.
Most other forms of respect have varied with time and with place. The
ancient Romans, for instance, never bowed; and amongst orientals, you
are thought to offer an insult if you uncover your head. In this
little England of ours, who could fancy two stout men curtseying to
each other? Yet this they did, and so recently as in Shakspere's days.
To use his words, they 'crook'd the pregnant hinges of the knee.'
Sometimes they curtseyed with the right knee singly, sometimes with
both, as did Romeo to the fiery Tybalt. Many and rapid, therefore,
were the changes in ceremonial forms, at least with us, the changeable
men of Christendom; else how could it happen that, two hundred and
fifty years back, men of rank in England should have saluted each
other by forms that now would be thought to indicate lunacy? And yet,
violent as the spirit of change might otherwise be, one thing never
changed--the expression of respect between man and man by rising from
their seats.

'Utque viro sancto _chorus assurrexerit_ omnis'

is a record belonging to the eldest of days; and that it belonged not
to the eldest times only, but also to the highest rank, is involved in
a memorable anecdote from the last days of Julius Caesar. He, the
mighty dictator--

'Yes, he, the foremost man of all this world'--

actually owed his assassination, under one representation, to the
burning resentment of his supposed aristocratic hauteur in a public
neglect of this very form. A deputation of citizens, on a matter of
business, had found him seated, and to their immeasurable disgust, he
had made no effort even to rise. His friends excused him on the
allegation, whether true or not, that at the moment he was physically
incapacitated from rising by a distressing infirmity. It might be so:
as Shakspere elsewhere observes, the black silk patch knows best
whether there is a wound underneath it. But, if it were _not_ so, then
the imperial man paid the full penalty of his offence, supposing the
rancorous remembrance of that one neglect were truly and indeed what
armed the Ides of March against his life. But, were this story as
apocryphal as the legends of our nurseries, still the bare possibility
that 'the laurelled majesty'[61] of that mighty brow should have been
laid low by one frailty of this particular description--this
possibility recalls us clamorously to the tr