ink your Lordship
may expect by and by a polite man. No "politer" man was to be found in
Britain than the rustic Robert Burns: high duchesses were captivated
with the chivalrous ways of the man; recognized that here was the true
chivalry, and divine nobleness of bearing,--as indeed they well might,
now when the Peasant God and Norse Thor had come down among them again!
Chivalry this, if not as they do chivalry in Drury Lane or West-End
drawing-rooms, yet as they do it in Valhalla and the General Assembly of
the Gods.

For indeed, who _invented_ chivalry, politeness, or anything that is
noble and melodious and beautiful among us, except precisely the like
of Johnson and of Burns? The select few who in the generations of
this world were wise and valiant, they, in spite of all the tremendous
majority of blockheads and slothful belly-worshippers, and noisy ugly
persons, have devised whatsoever is noble in the manners of man to man.
I expect they will learn to be polite, your Lordship, when you give them
a chance!--Nor is it as a school of human culture, for this or for
any other grace or gift, that Parliament will be found first-rate
or indispensable. As experience in the river is indispensable to the
ferryman, so is knowledge of his Parliament to the British Peel or
Chatham;--so was knowledge of the OEil-de-Boeuf to the French Choiseul.
Where and how said river, whether Parliament with Wilkeses, or
OEil-de-Boeuf with Pompadours, can be waded, boated, swum; how the
miscellaneous cargoes, "measures" so called, can be got across it,
according to their kinds, and landed alive on the hither side as
facts:--we have all of us our _ferries_ in this world; and must know the
river and its ways, or get drowned some day! In that sense, practice
in Parliament is indispensable to the British Statesman; but not in any
other sense.

A school, too, of manners and of several other things, the Parliament
will doubtless be to the aspirant Statesman; a school better or
worse;--as the OEil-de-Boeuf likewise was, and as all scenes where men
work or live are sure to be. Especially where many men work together,
the very rubbing against one another will grind and polish off their
angularities into roundness, into "politeness" after a sort; and the
official man, place him how you may, will never want for schooling,
of extremely various kinds. A first-rate school one cannot call this
Parliament for him;--I fear to say what rate at present! In so fa