ct society, running through all the
countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted aristocracy, or
fraternity of the best, which, without written law, or exact usage of
any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every new-planted island, and
adopts and makes its own whatever personal beauty or extraordinary
native endowment anywhere appears.

2. What fact more conspicuous in modern history, than the creation of
the gentleman? Chivalry[373] is that, and loyalty is that, and, in
English literature, half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir
Philip Sidney[374] to Sir Walter Scott,[375] paint this figure. The
word _gentleman_, which, like the word Christian, must hereafter
characterize the present and the few preceding centuries, by the
importance attached to it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable
properties. Frivolous and fantastic additions have got associated with
the name, but the steady interest of mankind in it must be attributed
to the valuable properties which it designates. An element which
unites all the most forcible persons of every country; makes them
intelligible and agreeable to each other, and is somewhat so precise,
that it is at once felt if an individual lack the masonic sign,[376]
cannot be any casual product, but must be an average result of the
character and faculties universally found in men. It seems a certain
permanent average; as the atmosphere is a permanent composition,
whilst so many gases are combined only to be decompounded. _Comme il
faut_, is the Frenchman's description of good society, _as we must
be_. It is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely
that class who have most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this
hour, and, though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest
and highest tone of human feeling, is as good as the whole society
permits it to be. It is made of the spirit, more than of the talent of
men, and is a compound result, into which every great force enters as
an ingredient, namely, virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power.

3. There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express the
excellence of manners and social cultivation, because the qualities
are fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the
cause. The word _gentleman_ has not any correlative abstract[377] to
express the quality. _Gentility_ is mean, and _gentilesse_[378] is
obsolete. But we must keep alive in the vernacular the distinction
between _fa