ancement, the
plebeian instincts, while they forget, perhaps, the homely virtues of
the class from which they spring. There is a nobility of birth, seldom
to be counterfeited or mistaken, wholly irrespective of the rank and
wealth which are either its graceful accompaniments or its insufficient
substitutes; fostered and strengthened by early habits and education,
but none the less originally innate--as much an endowment from heaven as
beauty, strength, or talent, and more valuable than all. Many men have
the tact to adapt themselves to the station and the society to which
they have risen, however much above their own level; they acquire the
habits and the tastes, seldom the feelings, of a gentleman. They act the
character well; it is carefully studied, and on the whole well
sustained; it is a correct and painstaking performance, and the points
tell distinctly; but there is throughout that indirect appeal to the
audience which marks it to be only acting. They are more studiously
aristocratic than the aristocracy, and have a horror of vulgarity which
is in itself essentially vulgar.

And such a man was the dean of ----. On the philosophic principle of
hating all to whom we are under obligations, if there was any thing he
cordially detested, it was trade. His constant aim was to forget his
unfortunate origin himself, if possible to lead others who knew him to
forget it, and to keep strangers from knowing it at all. And as he
shrank from every shape and sound plebeian, so he industriously
cultivated every opening to "good society." There was not a member of
his own college, graduate or under-graduate, of any pretensions to
family, who could not speak from experience of the dean's capital
dinners, and his invariable urbanity. No young honourable, or tenth
cousin to an honourable, ever got into a row, that he had not cause to
bless the dean's good offices for getting him out. And if some of the
old stagers contented themselves with eating his dinners, and returning
them in the proportion of one to five, the unsophisticated gratitude of
youth, less cunning in the ways of the world, declared unhesitatingly,
in its own idiomatic language, "that old Hodgett was a regular brick,
and gave very beany feeds." And so his fame travelled far beyond his own
collegiate walls, and out-college honourables and gentlemen-commoners
were content to make the acquaintance, and eat the dinners that were so
freely offered. And as the dean had reall