er rightly or wrongly, I know not--as they appeared to me.

III.

I always considered my father--I speak of him in the past tense, because
we are now separated for ever; because he is henceforth as dead to me
as if the grave had closed over him--I always considered my father to be
the proudest man I ever knew; the proudest man I ever heard of. His
was not that conventional pride, which the popular notions are fond of
characterising by a stiff, stately carriage; by a rigid expression of
features; by a hard, severe intonation of voice; by set speeches of
contempt for poverty and rags, and rhapsodical braggadocio about rank
and breeding. My father's pride had nothing of this about it. It was
that quiet, negative, courteous, inbred pride, which only the closest
observation could detect; which no ordinary observers ever detected at
all.

Who that observed him in communication with any of the farmers on any of
his estates--who that saw the manner in which he lifted his hat, when
he accidentally met any of those farmers' wives--who that noticed his
hearty welcome to the man of the people, when that man happened to be a
man of genius--would have thought him proud? On such occasions as these,
if he had any pride, it was impossible to detect it. But seeing him
when, for instance, an author and a new-made peer of no ancestry entered
his house together--observing merely the entirely different manner in
which he shook hands with each--remarking that the polite cordiality
was all for the man of letters, who did not contest his family rank with
him, and the polite formality all for the man of title, who did--you
discovered where and how he was proud in an instant. Here lay his
fretful point. The aristocracy of rank, as separate from the aristocracy
of ancestry, was no aristocracy for _him._ He was jealous of it; he
hated it. Commoner though he was, he considered himself the social
superior of any man, from a baronet up to a duke, whose family was less
ancient than his own.

Among a host of instances of this peculiar pride of his which I could
cite, I remember one, characteristic enough to be taken as a sample of
all the rest. It happened when I was quite a child, and was told me by
one of my uncles now dead--who witnessed the circumstance himself, and
always made a good story of it to the end of his life.

A merchant of enormous wealth, who had recently been raised to the
peerage, was staying at one of our country houses. His dau