e to
do so, preferring his native Doric to a more refined vocabulary, "A
Yorkshire burr," he affirmed, "was as much better than a cockney's lisp
as a bull's bellow than a raton's squeak."

Mr. Yorke knew every one, and was known by every one, for miles round;
yet his intimate acquaintances were very few. Himself thoroughly
original, he had no taste for what was ordinary: a racy, rough
character, high or low, ever found acceptance with him; a refined,
insipid personage, however exalted in station, was his aversion. He
would spend an hour any time in talking freely with a shrewd workman of
his own, or with some queer, sagacious old woman amongst his cottagers,
when he would have grudged a moment to a commonplace fine gentleman or
to the most fashionable and elegant, if frivolous, lady. His preferences
on these points he carried to an extreme, forgetting that there may be
amiable and even admirable characters amongst those who cannot be
original. Yet he made exceptions to his own rule. There was a certain
order of mind, plain, ingenuous, neglecting refinement, almost devoid of
intellectuality, and quite incapable of appreciating what was
intellectual in him, but which, at the same time, never felt disgust at
his rudeness, was not easily wounded by his sarcasm, did not closely
analyze his sayings, doings, or opinions, with which he was peculiarly
at ease, and, consequently, which he peculiarly preferred. He was lord
amongst such characters. They, while submitting implicitly to his
influence, never acknowledged, because they never reflected on, his
superiority; they were quite tractable, therefore, without running the
smallest danger of being servile; and their unthinking, easy, artless
insensibility was as acceptable, because as convenient, to Mr. Yorke as
that of the chair he sat on, or of the floor he trod.

It will have been observed that he was not quite uncordial with Mr.
Moore. He had two or three reasons for entertaining a faint partiality
to that gentleman. It may sound odd, but the first of these was that
Moore spoke English with a foreign, and French with a perfectly pure,
accent; and that his dark, thin face, with its fine though rather wasted
lines, had a most anti-British and anti-Yorkshire look. These points
seem frivolous, unlikely to influence a character like Yorke's; but the
fact is they recalled old, perhaps pleasurable, associations--they
brought back his travelling, his youthful days. He had seen, amid