I Do Not Mean That My Friends Could Have
Sat Down Without Embarrassment And Laughable Disaster At The Table
Of A Duke.
That does not imply an inferiority of breeding, but a
difference of usage.
Thus I flatter myself that I conducted myself
well among my fellow-passengers; yet my most ambitious hope is not
to have avoided faults, but to have committed as few as possible.
I know too well that my tact is not the same as their tact, and
that my habit of a different society constituted, not only no
qualification, but a positive disability to move easily and
becomingly in this. When Jones complimented me - because I 'managed
to behave very pleasantly' to my fellow-passengers, was how he put
it - I could follow the thought in his mind, and knew his compliment
to be such as we pay foreigners on their proficiency in English. I
dare say this praise was given me immediately on the back of some
unpardonable solecism, which had led him to review my conduct as a
whole. We are all ready to laugh at the ploughman among lords; we
should consider also the case of a lord among the ploughmen. I
have seen a lawyer in the house of a Hebridean fisherman; and I
know, but nothing will induce me to disclose, which of these two
was the better gentleman. Some of our finest behaviour, though it
looks well enough from the boxes, may seem even brutal to the
gallery. We boast too often manners that are parochial rather than
universal; that, like a country wine, will not bear transportation
for a hundred miles, nor from the parlour to the kitchen.
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