It may be cynical; I am
sure I will be told it is selfish; but I will spend my money
as I please and for my own intimate personal gratification,
and should count myself a nincompoop indeed to lay out the
colour of a halfpenny on any fancied social decency or duty.
I shall not wear gloves unless my hands are cold, or unless
I am born with a delight in them. Dress is my own affair,
and that of one other in the world; that, in fact, and for
an obvious reason, of any woman who shall chance to be in
love with me. I shall lodge where I have a mind. If I
do not ask society to live with me, they must be silent;
and even if I do, they have no further right but to
refuse the invitation.
*
To a gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in
every relation and grade of society. It is a high calling,
to which a man must first be born, and then devote himself
for life. And, unhappily, the manners of a certain
so-called upper grade have a kind of currency, and meet
with a certain external acceptation throughout all the
others, and this tends to keep us well satisfied with
slight acquirements and the amateurish accomplishments
of a clique. But manners, like art, should be human
and central.
*
Respectability is a very thing in its way, but it does not
rise superior to all considerations. I would not for a
moment venture to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I
think I will go as far as this: that if a position is
admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and
superfluously useless, although it were as respectable as
the Church of England, the sooner a man is out of it, the
better for himself and all concerned.
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