When it comes to the proffers, and refusals, and insistences, and
acceptances between people of condition, such as I witnessed once
in a crowded first-class carriage from London on an Oxford
holiday, nothing could be more gently urgent, more beautifully
forbearing. If the writers of our romantic novels could get just
those manners into their fiction, I should not mind their dealing
so much with the English nobility and gentry; for those who
intend being our nobility and gentry, by-and-by, could not do
better than study such high-breeding.
If we approach the morals of either superiors or inferiors, we
are in a region where it behooves us to tread carefully. To be
honest, I know nothing about them, and I will not assume to know
anything. I heard from authority which I could not suspect of
posing for omniscience that the English rustics were apt to be
very depraved, but they may on the other hand be saints for all
that I can prove against them. They are superstitious, it is
said, and there are few villages or old houses that have not
their tutelary spectres.
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