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.
75/542 page 59
![tone, expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is habitually excluded from conversational intercourse. This is the reason why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than others. . . . Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which exist in every community, and nothing is harder to define. The great gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters and mistresses ; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a republic ; mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex- presidents are nothing to them. ... Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality, there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this of social position-—as you see by the circum- stance that the core of all the great social orders the world has seen, has been, and is still, for the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies arranged in a regular scale of prece- dence among themselves, but superior as a body to all else. . . . Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken ; there never is a formal vote. The women settle it mostly ; and they know wonderfully well what is presentable, and what can’t stand the blaze of the chandeliers and the critical eye and ear of people trained to know a staring shade in a ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an i]l-bred tone, an angular movement; everything that betrays a coarse fibre and cheap training. As a general thing, you do not get elegance short of two or three removes from the soil, out of which our best blood doubtless comes—quite as good, no doubt, as if it came from those old prize-fighters with iron pots on their heads, to whom some great people are so fond of tracing their descent, through a line of small artisans and petty shopkeepers whose veins have held ‘ base ’ fluid enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima ! O. W. Holmes, Professor at Breakfast Table, eh. vi. The true gentleman is of no rank or class. He may be a peasant or a noble. Everyman may be gentle, civil, tolerant, and forbearing. You may find politeness in the tent of the Arab, or in the cottage of the ploughman. Politeness is but natural, genial and manly deference to others, without syco- phancy or hypocrisy. Riches and rank have no necessary connections with gentlemanly qualities. The humblest man may be a gentleman, in word and in spirit. He may be](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29008529_0077.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
