table boor, sucked into
office by one of those eddies in the flow of popular sentiment which
carry straws and chips into the public harbor, while the prostrate
trunks of the monarchs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream
to the gulf of political oblivion! Think of him, I say, and of the
concentrated gaze of good society through its thousand eyes, all
confluent, as it were, in one great burning-glass of ice that shrivels
its wretched object in fiery torture, itself cold as the glacier of an
unsunned cavern! No,--there will be angels of good-breeding then as now,
to shield the victim of free institutions from himself and from his
torturers. I can fancy a lovely woman playfully withdrawing the knife
which he would abuse by making it an instrument for the conveyance
of food,--or, failing in this kind artifice, sacrificing herself by
imitating his use of that implement; how much harder than to plunge it
into her bosom, like Lucretia! I can see her studying his provincial
dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western or
Southern barbarisms. She has learned that _haeow_ means _what_; that
_thinkin'_ is the same thing as _thinking_; or she has found out the
meaning of that extraordinary monosyllable, which no single-tongued
phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson and
at its embouchure, and elsewhere,--what they say when they think they
say _first_, (_fe-eest,--fe_ as in the French _le_),--or that _cheer_
means _chair_,--or that _urritation_ means _irritation_,--and so of
other enormities. Nothing surprises her. The highest breeding, you know,
comes round to the Indian standard,--to take everything coolly,--_nil
admirari_,--if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for
the same thing.

If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to foot to
see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not grown a little
older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice, or if your
complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then convey the fact
to you, in the style in which the Poor Relation addressed the
divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like. I hate the sight
of the wretches. Don't for mercy's sake think I hate _them_; the
distinction is one my friend or I drew long ago. No matter where you
find such people; they are clowns. The rich woman who looks and talks in
this way is not half so much a lady as her Irish servant, whose pr