unless my hands are cold, or unless I am born
with a delight in them. Dress is my own affair, and that of one other
in the world; that, in fact, and for an obvious reason, of any woman who
shall chance to be in love with me. I shall lodge where I have a mind.
If I do not ask society to live with me, they must be silent; and even
if I do, they have no further right but to refuse the invitation.

*****

To a gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in every relation
and grade of society. It is a high calling, to which a man must first be
born, and then devote himself for life. And, unhappily, the manners of
a certain so-called upper grade have a kind of currency, and meet with
a certain external acceptation throughout all the others, and this tends
to keep us well satisfied with slight acquirements and the amateurish
accomplishments of a clique. But manners, like art, should be human and
central.

*****

Respectability is a very thing in its way, but it does not rise superior
to all considerations. I would not for a moment venture to hint that it
was a matter of taste; but I think I will go as far as this: that if
a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and
superfluously useless, although it were as respectable as the Church of
England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself and all
concerned.

*****

After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into his
neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to go
farther and discover what is really true. He is content to find that
things are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it that they
do not exist at all. He sees our virtues are not what they pretend they
are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us the possession of virtue
altogether. He has learned the first lesson, that no man is wholly good;
but he has not even suspected that there is another equally true, to
wit, that no man is wholly bad.

*****

Or take the case of men of letters. Every piece of work which is not as
good as you can make it, which you have palmed off imperfect, meagrely
thought, niggardly in execution, upon mankind, who is your paymaster
on parole, and in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue
performance, should rise up against you in the court of your own heart
and condemn you for a thief.

*****

Sympathy is a thing to be encouraged, apart from humane considerations,
because it suppl