426 INGREDIENTS FOR A GENTLEMAN. 



do so, to be as clear as the difference between a known 

 half-bred horse and the thorough-bred one I say 

 known, because we pretty well know that we do not 

 know how half the half-bred ones are bred. 



I have said it required many rare ingredients to 

 make a gentleman that is, what in every sense of 

 the word must be held as a perfect gentleman. These 

 ingredients I conceive to be, good family, good educa- 

 tion, good society, good manners, and good conduct. 

 These I consider constitute a gentleman. If we add 

 to these, polished and winning address, and carriage, 

 I think we see something like a perfect gentleman. 

 That a man may be a gentleman without possessing 

 all these advantages, or by possessing them in a very 

 moderate degree, we all know, and courtesy allows the 

 title to many such. Personal merit and superior 

 talent very properly in many cases break down the 

 barrier between the man of family and the plebeian, 

 and every liberal mind must rejoice in seeing the latter 

 burst those bonds that held his forefathers as serfs to 

 his more aristocratic brethren. If, however, fortune 

 only has elevated him (which in a commercial country 

 it may do) to a rank in society to which his most 

 sanguine hopes never aspired, let him remember he 

 owes it to no merit of his own. If superior talents 

 have done this for him, the high attributes of such a 

 mind should teach him that there are numbers of his 

 fellow-men in whose bosom lies the germ of all his 

 qualities, but from its having fallen on a more sterile 

 soil, wants the means to burst forth : and, above all, 

 let him remember that no men despise the advantages 

 of birth but those who do not possess them ; and that 

 in those who profess to do so, it is at best but a vul- 

 gar bravado, a feeble and futile attempt to depreciate 

 advantages they cannot enjoy. 



