, if she
happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered these
monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the ludicrous
surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized
upon many of the persons who were present,--had guessed what a sudden
flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby,
perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,--so inherent in
their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion
cannot exclude its impertinences,--the good man would have given his
marriage-fee twice over to recall that superb and full-blown vulgarism.
Any persons whom it could please could have no better notion of what the
words referred to signify than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.

MAN! Sir! WOMAN! Sir! Gentility is a fine thing, not to be undervalued,
as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes before that.

"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"

The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from the
finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat is below
a certain level. Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and all the graceful
ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the surface, the elegances
and suavities of life die out one by one as we sink through the social
scale. Fortunately, the virtues are more tenacious of life, and last
pretty well until we get down to the mud of absolute pauperism, where
they do not flourish greatly.

--I had almost forgotten about our boarders. As the Model of all the
Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is the reason
we are not all very sorry. Surely we all like good persons. She is a
good person. Therefore we like her.--Only we don't.

This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the principle
which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit and embodied
in the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably immortal, this
syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had occasion to
construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as I have done for
the Model. "Pious and painefull." Why has that excellent old phrase gone
out of use? Simply because these good painefull or painstaking persons
proved to be such nuisances in the long run, that the word "painefull"
came, before people thought of it, to mean pain-giving instead of
painstaking.

--So, the old fel