d, at the same time, we are
ignorant of those of our friends, of our kindred, and of our own. We are
in all these cases either too near or too far off the object to judge of
it properly.

Persons, for instance, in a higher or middle rank of life know little
or nothing of the characters of those below them, as servants, country
people, etc. I would lay it down in the first place as a general rule
on this subject, that all uneducated people are hypocrites. Their sole
business is to deceive. They conceive themselves in a state of hostility
with others, and stratagems are fair in war. The inmates of the kitchen
and the parlour are always (as far as respects their feelings and
intentions towards each other) in Hobbes's; 'state of nature.' Servants
and others in that line of life have nothing to exercise their spare
talents for invention upon but those about them. Their superfluous
electrical particles of wit and fancy are not carried off by those
established and fashionable conductors, novels and romances. Their
faculties are not buried in books, but all alive and stirring, erect
and bristling like a cat's back. Their coarse conversation sparkles with
'wild wit, invention ever new.' Their betters try all they can to set
themselves up above them, and they try all they can to pull them down to
their own level. They do this by getting up a little comic interlude,
a daily, domestic, homely drama out of the odds and ends of the family
failings, of which there is in general a pretty plentiful supply, or
make up the deficiency of materials out of their own heads. They turn
the qualities of their masters and mistresses inside out, and any real
kindness or condescension only sets them the more against you. They are
not to be taken in that way--they will not be baulked in the spite they
have to you. They only set to work with redoubled alacrity, to lessen
the favour or to blacken your character. They feel themselves like a
degraded _caste,_ and cannot understand how the obligations can be all
on one side, and the advantages all on the other. You cannot come to
equal terms with them--they reject all such overtures as insidious and
hollow--nor can you ever calculate upon their gratitude or goodwill, any
more than if they were so many strolling Gipsies or wild Indians. They
have no fellow-feeling, they keep no faith with the more privileged
classes. They are in your power, and they endeavour to be even with you
by trick and cunning, by l