fashion, and in the opinion of the public; speak advantageously of them behind their backs in companies who you have reason to believe will tell them again."

A man not of principles but of expedients, Lord Chesterfield strove to cultivate manners in his son as a means of worldly success, especially as an invaluable aid in the diplomatic career. "Even polished brass," he tells him, "will pass upon more people than rough gold." Add to this the following sentence, and we have the texts upon which were written most of Chesterfield's Letters to his Son; "The pleasures of low life are all of this mistaken, merely sensual and disgraceful nature; whereas those of high life and in good company (though possibly in themselves not more moral) are more delicate, more refined, less dangerous and less disgraceful; and in the common course of things, not reckoned disgraceful at all."

Chesterfield found the standard of gentlemanhood low, and he left it lower. His once famous Letters are now historical, constituting an instructive document on one province of English life, towards the end of the last century; but, fifty and forty years ago they were practical, and even in our country were put into the hands of young men by moral fathers, who had not read, but adopted them from their English fame; and gentlemanhood, which has since revised and rejected them as canon, is not yet entirely purged of the virus wherewith they poisoned it.

The failure of Lord Chesterfield in his cherished aim was even comical. The son grew up to be curiously deficient in what the father set so much store by. He was a man of sense and acquirement with common manners, and could not take a polish; and possibly for this he deserves respect, as besides æsthetic incapacity it may have indicated a native honesty of core. He was more the gentleman for his very plainness. At all events, not being born to be a graceful, winning man of the world, all his father's discipline and persevering pains could not make him one. An ancient king of Scotland, being under weighty obligation to an humble woman, offered to grant any favor she would ask. "Make my son a gentleman," exclaimed her true maternal heart. “I can make your son a nobleman: I cannot make him a gentleman," rejoined the king, uttering a deeper truth than he knew; for a man must be born a gentleman in a finer sense than the word commonly imports.

IX.

HONOR-PERSONALITY - PRIDE AND VANITY - FASHION-VULGARITY

NTO the texture of gentlemanhood the sen

INTO

timent of honor enters integrally as a bracing constituent. In its healthy condition honor is the accompaniment and complement of noble individuality. The single man is vivified and straightened by a warm sense of independent self-subsistence, whereof honor is at once the offspring and the guardian, - a guardian as sleepless as the anxious maternal eye, as tender to every approaching breath as an aspenleaf in June. Honor is not a virtue in itself, it is the mail behind which the virtues fight more securely. A man without honor is as maimed in his equipment as an accoutred knight without helmet. Honor is not simple truthfulness: it is truthfulness sparkling with the fire of a susceptive personality. It is something more than an ornament even to the loftiest; and Alfred and Washington had been incomplete without it. Originating in selfestimation, it yet gives no countenance to the pretensions of egotism, and differs as much from an inflated pride as a dignified self-respect does from the stiffness and cold-pokerism of self-conceit. One who deserves that it be fully said of him, that he is a man of honor, is one in whom uprightness is fortified by a keen sense of personal responsibility, and honesty is made graceful and stately by a spirited self-reliance.

The honor that Hotspur would "pluck from the pale-faced moon- or bottom of the deep," and that is the subject of Falstaff's catechism, is a synonyme of reputation - a something to be conferred by others, the creation of an outside opinion, in which sense the word is mostly used by Shakspeare, in the singular as well as the plural. That which can neither be conferred nor taken away, which is interior, and inviolate except by the owner, the refined essence of the noblest self hood, we now express by the word honor, which at the same time