The ideal of a gentleman, or, A mirror for gentlefolks : a portrayal in literature from the earliest times / by A. Smythe-Palmer.

  • Palmer, Abram Smythe.
Date:
[1908]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The ideal of a gentleman, or, A mirror for gentlefolks : a portrayal in literature from the earliest times / by A. Smythe-Palmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    519/542 (page 503)
    breeding whose notion of a perfect gentleman is a man that never speaks to her in the street without taking his hat quite off, and does not sit in her presence until she does him tire honour to request him to do so. Peathaps the waiter s ciiteiion is quite as reasonable as hers. Rd. Grant White, Every-day English, 364. I call him now a raal (real) gentleman. I held his hoss the tother day, and he gan (gave) me a shilling. [Norfolk Labourer.] High breeding is something, but well bred or not. In the end the one question is, what have you got ? So needful it is to have money, heigh-ho ! So needful it is to have money. A. H. Clough, Spectator ah Extra. In Mrs. H. M. Stanley’s Street Arabs, a gentleman was described by one boy ‘ with some fervour ’ as ‘ a fellow who has a watch and chain’. This belated support to the gig theory of gentility is curious, as illustrating the extieme hazi- ness which pervades the ideas of the London Street Aiab in regard to the proper use of the most memorable word in the English language. A Metropolitan gamin, in a moment of expansion, once remarked to his teacher in a night school, ‘ When you come here first we thought you was a gentleman, but now, of course, we knows different’. The possession of a watch and chain had no doubt at first favoured the idea of social position, but this had been triumphantly rebutted by the fact that their owner had actually come to live in the dis- trict, and was visibly hard at work all day and every da}^. No reputation for gentlemanly conduct could survive this last piece of antagonistic evidence. The Standard. Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, But leave us still our old Nobility. 1841, Lord J. Manners, England’s Trust, p. 24. It is a well-known Irish boast that a finished Irish gentleman