imself with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton, silk, and wool;
honors himself with architecture; writes laws, and contrives to execute
his will through the hands of many nations; and, especially, establishes
a select society, running through all the countries of intelligent
men, a self-constituted aristocracy, or fraternity of the best, which,
without written law or exact usage of any kind, perpetuates itself,
colonizes every new-planted island and adopts and makes its own whatever
personal beauty or extraordinary native endowment anywhere appears.

What fact more conspicuous in modern history than the creation of
the gentleman? Chivalry is that, and loyalty is that, and, in English
literature, half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir Philip Sidney
to Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure. The word gentleman, which, like
the word Christian, must hereafter characterize the present and the few
preceding centuries by the importance attached to it, is a homage
to personal and incommunicable properties. Frivolous and fantastic
additions have got associated with the name, but the steady interest
of mankind in it must be attributed to the valuable properties which
it designates. An element which unites all the most forcible persons of
every country; makes them intelligible and agreeable to each other, and
is somewhat so precise that it is at once felt if an individual lack
the masonic sign,--cannot be any casual product, but must be an average
result of the character and faculties universally found in men. It
seems a certain permanent average; as the atmosphere is a permanent
composition, whilst so many gases are combined only to be decompounded.
Comme il faut, is the Frenchman's description of good Society: as we
must be. It is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely
that class who have most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this
hour, and though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest and
highest tone of human feeling, is as good as the whole society permits
it to be. It is made of the spirit, more than of the talent of men,
and is a compound result into which every great force enters as an
ingredient, namely virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power.

There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express the
excellence of manners and social cultivation, because the quantities are
fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the cause.
The word gentleman has not