Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/117

114 Judge W——, our best-mannered country-gentleman. Their lordships have rather more conventionalism, more practice, but there is do essential difference. Descend a little lower, and a very little lower than those gentry who by birth and association are interwoven with the nobility, and you will see people with education and refinement enough, as you would think, to ensure them the tranquillity that comes of self-respect, manifesting a consciousness of inferiority; in some it appears in servility, as in Mrs. ——, who, having scrambled on to ——'s shoulder and got a peep into the lord-and-lady world, and beard the buzz that rises from the precincts of Buckingham Palace, entertained us through a long morning visit with third or fourth hand stories about "poor Lady Flora;" or in obsequiousness, as in the very pretty wife of ——, whose eyes, cheeks, and voice are changed if she is but spoken to by a titled person, though she remains as impaasive as polar ice to the influence of a plebeian presence. Some manifest their impatience of this vassalage of caste in a petulent but impotent resistance, and others show a crushed feeling, not the humility of the flower that has grown in the shade, but the abasement and incapacity ever to rise of that which has been trodden under foot. Even the limbs are stiffened and the gait moved by this consciousness that haunts than from the cradle to the grave.

A certain great tailor was here yesterday morning to take R.'s direction. His bad grammar, his