Good-breeding, which differs, if at all, from High-breeding, only as
it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully
insists on its own rights, I discern no special connexion with wealth
or birth: but rather that it lies in human nature itself, and is due
from all men towards all men. Of a truth, were your Schoolmaster at
his post, and worth anything when there, this, with so much else,
would be reformed. Nay, each man were then also his neighbour's
schoolmaster; till at length a rude-visaged, unmannered Peasant could
no more be met with, than a Peasant unacquainted with botanical
Physiology, or who felt not that the clod he broke was created in
Heaven.

'For whether thou bear a sceptre or a sledgehammer, art thou not
ALIVE; is not this thy brother ALIVE? "There is but one temple in the
world," says Novalis, "and that temple is the Body of Man. Nothing is
holier than this high Form. Bending before men is a reverence done to
this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our hands
on a human Body."

'On which ground, I would fain carry it farther than most do; and
whereas the English Johnson only bowed to every Clergyman, or man with
a shovel-hat, I would bow to every Man with any sort of hat, or with
no hat whatever. Is not he a Temple, then; the visible Manifestation
and Impersonation of the Divinity? And yet, alas, such indiscriminate
bowing serves not. For there is a Devil dwells in man, as well as a
Divinity; and too often the bow is but pocketed by the _former_. It
would go to the pocket of Vanity (which is your clearest phasis of the
Devil, in these times); therefore must we withhold it.

'The gladder am I, on the other hand, to do reverence to those Shells
and outer Husks of the Body, wherein no devilish passion any longer
lodges, but only the pure emblem and effigies of Man: I mean, to
Empty, or even to Cast Clothes. Nay, is it not to Clothes that most
men do reverence: to the fine frogged broadcloth, nowise to the
"straddling animal with bandy legs" which it holds, and makes a
Dignitary of? Who ever saw any Lord my-lorded in tattered blanket
fastened with wooden skewer? Nevertheless, I say, there is in such
worship a shade of hypocrisy, a practical deception: for how often
does the Body appropriate what was meant for the Cloth only! Whoso
would avoid falsehood, which is the essence of all Sin, will perhaps
see good to take a different course. That reverence which cannot act