s seldom used by carriages, on such special occasions as a
funeral or a wedding. Ignorance and coarseness of language also were
still lingering even upon higher levels of society than might have been
expected to retain such mists. About this time, a neighbouring squire, a
man of many acres, referred the following difficulty to Mr. Austen's
decision: 'You know all about these sort of things. Do tell us. Is
Paris in France, or France in Paris? for my wife has been disputing with
me about it.' The same gentleman, narrating some conversation which he
had heard between the rector and his wife, represented the latter as
beginning her reply to her husband with a round oath; and when his
daughter called him to task, reminding him that Mrs. Austen never swore,
he replied, 'Now, Betty, why do you pull me up for nothing? that's
neither here nor there; you know very well that's only _my way of telling
the story_.' Attention has lately been called by a celebrated writer to
the inferiority of the clergy to the laity of England two centuries ago.
The charge no doubt is true, if the rural clergy are to be compared with
that higher section of country gentlemen who went into parliament, and
mixed in London society, and took the lead in their several counties; but
it might be found less true if they were to be compared, as in all
fairness they ought to be, with that lower section with whom they usually
associated. The smaller landed proprietors, who seldom went farther from
home than their county town, from the squire with his thousand acres to
the yeoman who cultivated his hereditary property of one or two hundred,
then formed a numerous class--each the aristocrat of his own parish; and
there was probably a greater difference in manners and refinement between
this class and that immediately above them than could now be found
between any two persons who rank as gentlemen. For in the progress of
civilisation, though all orders may make some progress, yet it is most
perceptible in the lower. It is a process of 'levelling up;' the rear
rank 'dressing up,' as it were, close to the front rank. When Hamlet
mentions, as something which he had 'for _three years taken_ note of,'
that 'the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier,' it
was probably intended by Shakspeare as a satire on his own times; but it
expressed a principle which is working at all times in which society
makes any progress. I believe that a century ago t