little to manifest the effrontery of their
opinions.

The difference between our worldliness and the New-worldliness is chiefly
that here we are apt to remove, by a little space, the distinction
brought about by riches, to put it back, to interpose, between it and our
actual life, a generation or two, an education or two. Obviously, it was
riches that made the class differences, if not now, then a little time
ago. Therefore the New England citizen should not be reproved by us for
anything except his too great candour. A social guide-book to some city
of the Republic is in my hands. I note how the very names of streets
take a sound of veneration or of cheerful derision from the writer's pen.
It is evident that the names are almost enough. They have an expression.
He is like a _naif_ teller of humorous anecdotes, who cannot keep his own
smiles in order till he have done.

This social writer has scorn, as an author should, and he wreaks it upon
parishes. He turns me a phrase with the northern end of a town and makes
an epigram of the southern. He caps a sarcasm with an address.

In truth, we too might write social guide-books to the same effect, had
we the same simplicity. It is to be thought that we too hold an address,
be it a good one, so closely that if Fortune should see fit to snatch it
from us, she must needs do so with violence. Such unseemly violence, in
this as in other transactions, is ours in the clinging and not hers in
the taking. For equal is the force of Fortune, and steady is her grasp,
whether she despoil the great of their noble things or strip the mean of
things ignoble, whether she take from the clutching or the yielding hand.

Strange are the little traps laid by the Londoner so as to capture an
address by the hem if he may. You would think a good address to be of
all blessings the most stationary, and one to be either gained or missed,
and no two ways about it. But not so. You shall see it waylaid at the
angles of squares, with no slight exercise of skill, delayed, entreated,
detained, entangled, intricately caught, persuaded to round a corner,
prolonged beyond all probability, pursued.

One address there will in the future be for us, and few will visit there.
It will bear the number of a narrow house. May it avow its poverty and
be poor; for the obscure inhabitant, in frigid humility, shall have no
thought nor no eye askance upon the multitude.

THE AUDIENCE

The long l