in their faces that their
goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your children
cannot. And whatever offends one of these little ones cannot be right in
the eyes of Him who loved them so well.

After all, as _you_ are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably select
gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then all will be
right.

This repetition of the above words,--_gentleman and lady_,--which could
not be conveniently avoided, reminds me how much use is made of them by
those who ought to know what they mean. Thus, at a marriage ceremony,
once, of two very excellent persons who had been at service, instead
of, Do you take this man, etc.? and, Do you take this woman? how do you
think the officiating clergyman put the questions? It was, Do you, MISS
So and So, take this GENTLEMAN? and, Do you, MR. This or That, take
this LADY?! What would any English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England
herself, have thought, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her
and her bridegroom anything but plain woman and man at such a time?

I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she
happened to have been in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered
these monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the
ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that
seized upon many of the persons who were present,--had guessed what a
sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck,
the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,--so
inherent in their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of
religion cannot exclude its impertinences,--the good man would have
given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that superb and full-blown
vulgarism. Any persons whom it could please have no better notion of
what the words referred to signify than of the meaning of _apsides_ and
_asymptotes_.

MAN! Sir! WOMAN! Sir! Gentility is a fine thing, not to be undervalued,
as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes before that.

"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Where was then the gentleman?"

The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from the
finest training is not to be understood by those whose _habitat_ is
below a certain level. Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and all the
graceful ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the surface, the
elegances and suavities of life die out one by one a