The ideal of a gentleman, or, A mirror for gentlefolks : a portrayal in literature from the earliest times / by A. Smythe-Palmer.
- Abram Smythe Palmer
- Date:
- [1908]
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.
62/542 page 46
![Other races too have been obliged to import our word ‘ gentle- man.’ ‘ Its development was slow among ourselves, but sinee it came to maturity at home, it has spread widely abroad.’— Sat. Rev. 56, 342.] The Russian is obliged to use many words to convey the idea of our single term. Dr. Carl Abel, Slavic and Latin, Ilchester Lectures, 1883. A distinguished German jurist, writing in March 1883, to a friend of his and mine in England, added the following post- script ‘ Do you know any good treatise on the duties and character of a gentleman ? It is a peculiarly English social type. I should like to draw up a comparison with our Con- tinental rules of respectability.’ To this inquiry only one reply seemed to be possible, namely, that no such formal treatise has ever attained any reputation, if, indeed, it had ever been written, and yet the thought suggested itself : is not the type one which, even in the estima- tion of its enemies and detractors, has certain characteristics of value, worth preserving, therefore, in a special monograph, for the information of a curious posterity, to whom the type itself may be no longer aceessible ! Failing such a monograph, it may be worth while to indicate a few of these charaeter- istics, which, though familiar in the present day, may yet form valuable material for some future historian of the race. W. R. Browne, The English Gentleman, National Review, April, 1886, p. 261. Our English word gentleman is an instance of the difficulty of transferring to foreign words the associations which cluster around the native vocables which they attempt to represent. Not that every European country does not possess men of truth, courage, honour, generosity, refinement and elegance of conventional manners—The Castilian felt that the Arab had all this, when he said that his Moslem enemy was an hidalgo, a gentleman, though a Moor; . . . but it was in England that the ideal of social grace and moral excellence in man, as attributes of humanity superior in worth to the artificial claims of rank and conventional manner, was first conceived, named, and realized. . . . Its claims have been so generally recognized as to secure its adoption, as a word](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29008529_0064.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
