394 POPE. 



No observer of men can have failed to notice the clumsy 

 respect which the understanding pays to elegance of 

 manner and savoir-faire, nor what an awkward sense of 

 inferiority it feels in the presence of an accomplished 

 worldliness. The code of society is stronger with most 

 persons than that of Sinai, and many a man who would 

 not scruple to thrust his fingers in his neighbor's pocket 

 would forego green peas rather than use his knife as a 

 shovel. The submission with which the greater number 

 surrender their natural likings for the acquired taste of 

 what for the moment is called the World is a highly 

 curious phenomenon, and, however destructive of origi 

 nality, is the main safeguard of society and nurse of 

 civility. Any one who has witnessed the torments of an 

 honest citizen in a foreign gallery before some hideous 

 martyrdom which he feels it his duty to admire, though 

 it be hateful to him as nightmare, may well doubt 

 whether the gridiron of the saint were hotter than that of 

 the sinner. It is only a great mind or a strong charac 

 ter that knows how to respect its own provincialism and 

 can dare to be in fashion with itself. The bewildered 

 clown with his " Am I Giles 1 or am I not 1 " was but a 

 type of the average man who finds himself uniformed, 

 drilled, and keeping step, whether he will or no, with 

 the company into which destiny or chance has drafted 

 him, and which is marching him inexorably away from 

 everything that made him comfortable. 



The insularity of England, while it fostered pride and 

 reserve, entailed also that sensitiveness to ridicule which 

 haunts pride like an evil genius. " The English," says 

 Barclay, writing half a century before the Restoration, 

 "have for the most part grave minds and withdrawn, 

 as it were, into themselves for counsel ; they won 

 derfully admire themselves and the manners, genius, 

 and spirit of their own nation. In salutation or in 



