this
is Andrew, and this is Gregory,--they look each other in the eye; they
grasp each other's hand, to identify and signalize each other. It is
a great satisfaction. A gentleman never dodges; his eyes look straight
forward, and he assures the other party, first of all, that he has been
met. For what is it that we seek, in so many visits and hospitalities?
Is it your draperies, pictures, and decorations? Or do we not insatiably
ask, Was a man in the house? I may easily go into a great household
where there is much substance, excellent provision for comfort,
luxury, and taste, and yet not encounter there any Amphitryon who shall
subordinate these appendages. I may go into a cottage, and find a
farmer who feels that he is the man I have come to see, and fronts
me accordingly. It was therefore a very natural point of old feudal
etiquette that a gentleman who received a visit, though it were of his
sovereign, should not leave his roof, but should wait his arrival at
the door of his house. No house, though it were the Tuileries or the
Escurial, is good for anything without a master. And yet we are not
often gratified by this hospitality. Every body we know surrounds
himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage
and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his
guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature,
and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with his
fellow? It were unmerciful, I know, quite to abolish the use of these
screens, which are of eminent convenience, whether the guest is too
great or too little. We call together many friends who keep each other
in play, or by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young people, and
guard our retirement. Or if perchance a searching realist comes to our
gate, before whose eye we have no care to stand, then again we run to
our curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the voice of the Lord God
in the garden. Cardinal Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended
himself from the glances of Napoleon by an immense pair of green
spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, and speedily managed to rally them
off: and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough with eight
hundred thousand troops at his back, to face a pair of freeborn eyes,
but fenced himself with etiquette and within triple barriers of reserve;
and, as all the world knows from Madame de Stael, was wont, when he
found himself observed, to