THE SIX OF SPADES. 121 



grave. The second of these at one period of his life 

 was most austere and haughty. I may speak of 

 his faults, although he is dead, because he lived to 

 hate them, and to cast them from him ; and I have 

 no hesitation in enlarging upon them, as the circum- 

 stances of my story prompt. Well, then, he was 

 just the proudest, coldest, most disagreeable duke 

 that ever stalked (" stalk, to walk with high and 

 superb steps," says Dr. Johnson) over the earth. It 

 was a positive insult to the English language to call 

 so much ungraciousness "your grace." We gar 

 deners used to declare that the thermometers fell 

 twenty degrees whenever he walked through the 

 houses ; and that the water froze in the tanks and 

 cisterns. We were prepared to affirm that when he 

 put on his coronet the strawberry-leaves turned into 

 ice-plants. Indeed, we all of us found a relief and 

 comfort in this harmless kind of ridicule, just as 

 schoolboys most delight to mimic the master who 

 rules the most unkindly over them. It was a natural 

 and pleasant rebound from the constraint and awful 

 abasement to which his presence reduced us ; and 

 as for the propriety of our conduct, why, if men in 

 high places are not high-minded, as they ought to be, 

 they only become the more conspicuously assailable, 

 and the homage which is offered to them is as unreal 

 and worthless as the sham silver and the sham gold 

 which the Chinese offer to their gods. So the duke 

 played at being an idol, and we performed the wor- 

 shipping. He thought himself something more than 

 human, I am sure, and received our most lowly 

 obeisance as though he were upon a golden throne. 



