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In the matter of gentlemen, democrats cry, “Psha! Give us one of Nature’s gentlemen, and hang your aristocrats.” And so indeed Nature does make SOME gentlemen–a few here and there. But Art makes most. Good birth, that is, good handsome well-formed fathers and mothers, nice cleanly nursery-maids, good meals, good physicians, good education, few cares, pleasant easy habits of life, and luxuries not too great or enervating, but only refining–a course of these going on for a few generations are the best gentleman-makers in the world, and beat Nature hollow.

If, respected Madam, you say that there is something BETTER than gentility in this wicked world, and that honesty and personal wealth are more valuable than all the politeness and high-breeding that ever wore red-heeled pumps, knights’ spurs, or Hoby’s boots, Titmarsh for one is never going to say you nay. If you even go so far as to say that the very existence of this super-genteel society among us, from the slavish respect that we pay to it, from the dastardly manner in which we attempt to imitate its airs and ape its vices, goes far to destroy honesty of intercourse, to make us meanly ashamed of our natural affections and honest, harmless usages, and so does a great deal more harm than it is possible it can do good by its example–perhaps, Madam, you speak with some sort of reason. Potato myself, I can’t help seeing that the tulip yonder has the best place in the garden, and the most sunshine, and the most water, and the best tending–and not liking him over well. But I can’t help acknowledging that Nature has given him a much finer dress than ever I can hope to have, and of this, at least, must give him the benefit.

Or say, we are so many cocks and hens, my dear (sans arriere pensee), with our crops pretty full, our plumes pretty sleek, decent picking here and there in the straw-yard, and tolerable snug roosting in the barn: yonder on the terrace, in the sun, walks Peacock, stretching his proud neck, squealing every now and then in the most pert fashionable voice and flaunting his great supercilious dandified tail. Don’t let us be too angry, my dear, with the useless, haughty, insolent creature, because he despises us. SOMETHING is there about Peacock that we don’t possess. Strain your neck ever so, you can’t make it as long or as blue as his–cock your tail as much as you please, and it will never be half so fine to look at. But the most absurd, disgusting, contemptible sight in the world would you and I be, leaving the barn-door for my lady’s flower-garden, forsaking our natural sturdy walk for the peacock’s genteel rickety stride, and adopting the squeak of his voice in the place of our gallant lusty cock-a-doodle-dooing.

Do you take the allegory? I love to speak in such, and the above types have been presented to my mind while sitting opposite a gimcrack coat-of-arms and coronet that are painted in the Invalides Church, and assigned to one of the Emperor’s Generals.

Ventrebleu! Madam, what need have THEY of coats-of-arms and coronets, and wretched imitations of old exploded aristocratic gewgaws that they had flung out of the country–with the heads of the owners in them sometimes, for indeed they were not particular–a score of years before? What business, forsooth, had they to be meddling with gentility and aping its ways, who had courage, merit, daring, genius sometimes, and a pride of their own to support, if proud they were inclined to be? A clever young man (who was not of high family himself, but had been bred up genteelly at Eton and the university)–young Mr. George Canning, at the commencement of the French Revolution, sneered at “Roland the Just, with ribbons in his shoes,” and the dandies, who then wore buckles, voted the sarcasm monstrous killing. It was a joke, my dear, worthy of a lackey, or of a silly smart parvenu, not knowing the society into which his luck had cast him (God help him! in later years, they taught him what they were!), and fancying in his silly intoxication that simplicity was ludicrous and fashion respectable. See, now, fifty years are gone, and where are shoebuckles? Extinct, defunct, kicked into the irrevocable past off the toes of all Europe!