130 Etiquette. [FEB. 



some persons giving eighteen, and others eight and twenty : and so 

 insatiable is- human vanity, so immeasurable is human baseness, that no 

 limits could be set to the race between the lust for homage, and the 

 eagerness of subserviency. The same evil has occurred in the intercourse 

 of the literary world, and is evinced in the dedications of the old school; 

 whoso writers toiled and panted in vain to overtake the soaring vanity of 

 their patrons, for want of an established doxology, or scale of pro- 

 portions, which might regulate the eulogium upon some compound ratio 

 of the rank and the generosity of the party addressed. So, likewise, with 

 respect to the authors themselves : it is impossible for a friend to satisfy 

 them by any measure of the most ingenious flattery; for vanity will cavil 

 with phrases and with looks, and will go in search after concealed hints 

 at faults, even in the most decided and uncompromising eulogies. A 

 very worthy man, a friend of ours, but somewhat too much given to 

 punctilio, came one day with an open letter in his hand, and in a 

 paroxysm of grief and despair, lamented the dire, but unconscious 

 offence he must have given to his correspondent; "for see," said he, 

 pointing to the expanded sheet, " see here! he only calls me ' dear sir;' 

 he, who never before omitted the * my' in the whole course of his cor- 

 respondence." Tn all other respects, the letter was as freindly as heart 

 could desire. In much the same spirit, authors too frequently review the 

 critiques of their friends ; so that it would be immensely convenient to 

 establish some courtly etiquette for the occasion, some rubrick of praise, 

 which, like the " e per fino, le bacio con ogni reverenza il lembo della 

 sacra porpora" with its " umilissimo divotissimo ed obligatissimo 

 servidere" which concludes a letter to a cardinal, the more laconic and 

 pithy " high consideration"., of diplomacy might be considered d* obli- 

 gation, and pass current for as much or as little as the respective parties 

 think good; so as to gratify vanity, without compromising independence. 

 Take the matter then, both as it respects tyrant and slave, ceremony is a 

 mark only of weakness and insecurity ; and etiquettes, like habiliments, 

 (to go back to the clean shirt of the surveyor of the highways), are adapta- 

 tions to the imbecility, rather than the dignity, of our nature. It is an 

 established rule, that grandeur must do nothing for itself, and that every grade 

 of dignity should add something to the helplessness of the subject ; inso- 

 much, that the Pope, during the ceremony of mass, is not intrusted even 

 with the blowing of his own nose, but has an officer ad hoc, who 

 carries his "hand kerchief, and holds it up from time to time, at a small 

 distance, to receive the sacred rheum, ' Cato and Scipio,' says Voltaire, 

 were to each other, neither ' my lord' nor the ' honourable,' but plain 

 Cato and Scipio : neither was Rome's immortal senate an assemblage of 

 ' high mightinesses.' " Even the better part of our feudal despots, either 

 from want of leisure or of inclination, have treated ceremonies with 

 contempt. By an elaborate etiquette, life is reduced to a mere theatric 

 exhibition ; which increases in exaggeration, until the part only serves to 

 betray the actor : and the curtain which it drops between the monarch and 

 his people, at length only stimulates curiosity to pry more closely into 

 the rags and paint it is spread to conceal. To the state-puppet it is 

 pregnant with ennui and vexation ; and it requires a strong sense of per- 

 sonal insufficiency, latent beneath an inordinate quantum of personal 

 vanity, to render its chains endurable. There needs not a better standard 

 of the puny intellect of Louis XIV. and his successors, than the multi- 

 plicity of trifling and absurd practices to which they subjected themselves 



