Page:Essays and criticisms by Wainewright (1880).djvu/95

Rh difference in worth or respectability is denoted by the various styles in which individuals are addressed; but a certain weak impatience is often found pushing people to a childish resistance against these forms; and this resistance denotes, more than anything else, a feverish sensibility to their import. They who are most anxious to state what little store they set by dukes and lords, are precisely such as would set the most store by their titles, had the accident of birth bestowed them. Such persons, if closely watched, will be generally found, at one time or other, to make awkward allusions to their familiarity with knights, baronets, and barons, and to plume themselves on titled friendships. At the same time, in such a country as France, where the Bourgeois classes, until of late years, were really felt to be degraded, attempts to show that worth alone makes the man, were to be considered both useful and spirited. Nor do we know that it can, in any country, be regarded as unfair, to bring to the recollection of the privileged orders, that intellect has nothing necessarily to do with patents of nobility—although there are many brilliant examples, living ones and others, proving that such patents, and the highest intellectual honours, may be united. The following verses, however, are to be considered as bearing, in in every way, a foreign character, rather than a British one.