134 Etiquette. [FfiB- 



and " your grace" or " your lordship " is an indication of coldness and 

 reserve. The parvenu nobility, on the contrary, doubtful of the ad- 

 mission of their new claims, are remarkable for their " marque" and 

 punctiliousness. " What am I to call you now ?" asked a most intimate 

 friend of Cambaceres, on the establishment of Napoleon's aristocratical 

 hierarchy. " In society," he replied, " you must call me mon prince, of 

 course ; mais entre amis, monseigneur suffira." There is no country in 

 Europe, where etiquette is more burdensome in society than in England, 

 because vanity and pride are more closely put to their shifts to escape 

 from the equality of republican institutions. A private party cannot sit 

 down to dinner, without as much marshalling as at a coronation feast ; 

 and as the great must be imitated at all costs, the unqualified are some- 

 times puzzled to find grounds for precedence. First goes the church, then 

 the law. The captain of a volunteer corps takes the pas of the lieu- 

 tenant; and Mrs. Colonel Pattypan is mortally offended if she is not 

 handed out before Mrs. Major Sturgeon. A merchant or a banker looks 

 down with infinite disdain upon the richest member of the Stock Exchange, 

 and expects to go before him ; and an attorney claims precedence of a 

 retail tradesman. In ball-rooms it is still worse : red elbowed misses, 

 and their mammas, fret, and fume, and jostle each other, for their place 

 in the dance ; and God help the poor towns-woman who has the pre- 

 sumption to mingle among the dea? majorum gentium of estated and 

 county rank. All this is very laughable, when it does not end in 

 duelling and bloodshed ; and it forcibly reminds one of the chimney- 

 sweeper, who, when under the gallows, and on the point of undergoing 

 the sentence of the law. being desired by his punctilious partner in 

 calamity, to move farther off, replied with an angry " I shan't 

 I've as much right here as you." The worst of it is, however, 

 that all this is very natural ; and that it would be as difficult to cure 

 the lower classes, of their love of personal distinction, and of their 

 reverence for stars and garters, and other outward and visible signs of the 

 weakness and imposition of the great, as to cure the great of the desire to 

 impose. The Americans narrowly escaped from an hereditary aristocracy 

 and the order of Cincinnatus ; and O 1 Connell has tried hard to establish his 

 " liberators " of a country still the most enslaved in Christendom, as a 

 compensation for those honorific distinctions of which protestantism 

 chooses to retain the monopoly in its own hands. Philosophy may rave 

 as it will, "these little things are great to little men," and the less the 

 man, the greater is the object. A king at arms is, in his own estimation, 

 the greatest king in Europe, and a German baron is not more punctilious 

 than a master of the coternonies. The first desire with all men is power, 

 the next is the semblance of power; and it is perhaps a happy dispensation 

 that those who are cut off from the substantial rights of the citizen, should 

 find a compensation in the " decorations " of the slave; as in all other 

 moral cases the vices of the individual are repressed by those of the rest of 

 the community. The pride of Diogenes trampled on the pride of Plato ; 

 and the vanity of the excluded may be trusted for keeping within bounds 

 the vanity of the pre-eminent and the privileged. The great enemy, how- 

 ever, of etiquette is civilization, whicli is incessantly at work, simplifying 

 society. Knowledge, by opening our eyes to the substances .of things, 

 defends us from the juggle of forms ; and Napoleon, when he called a 

 throne a mere chair, with gilt nails driven into it, epitomised one of the 

 most striking results of the revolutionary contest. Strange that he should 



