ow the gilded lies vanish in his presence!
How he states, contradicts, confutes! how he smashes through proprieties
to realities, flooding the room with his aggressive vitality, mastering
by main force a position in the most exclusive set, and, by being
perfectly indifferent to their opinion, making it impossible for them to
put him down! He thus becomes a social power by becoming a social
rebel,--persecutes conventional politeness into submission to rude
veracity,--establishes an autocracy of man over the gentleman,--and
practises a kind of "Come-Outerism," while insisting on enjoying all the
advantages of _Go-Interism_. Ben Jonson in the age of Elizabeth, Samuel
Johnson in the last century, Carlyle and Brougham in the present, are
prominent examples of this somewhat insolent manhood in the presence of
social forms. It is, however, one of the rarest, as it is one of the
ugliest, kinds of human strength; it requires, perhaps, in its
combination, full as many defects as merits; and how difficult is its
justifiable exercise we see in the career of so illustrious a
philanthropist as Wilberforce,--a man whose speech in Parliament showed
no lack of vivid conceptions and smiting words, a man whom no threats of
personal violence could intimidate, and who would cheerfully have risked
his life for his cause, yet still a man who could never forget that he
was a Tory and a gentleman, who had no grit before lords and ladies,
whose Abolitionism was not sufficiently blunt and downright in the good
company of cabinet ministers, whose sensitive nature flinched at the
thought of being conscientiously impolite and heroically ill-natured,
and whose manners were thus frequently in the way of the full efficiency
of his morals. In many respects a hero, in all respects benevolent, he
still was not like Romilly, a man of grit. Politeness has been defined
as benevolence in small things. To be benevolent in great things,
decorum must sometimes yield to duty; and Draco, though in the king's
drawing-room, and loyally supporting in Parliament the measures of the
ministry, is still Draco, though cruelty in him has learned the dialect
of fashion and clothed itself in the privileges of the genteel.

Proceeding from social life to business life, we shall find that it is
this unamiable, but indomitable, quality of grit which not only acquires
fortunes, but preserves them after they have been acquired. The ruin
which overtakes so many merchants is due not