Perhaps, after all, fear is at the
root of the English veneration for gentility.
{5} Gentle and gentlemanly may be derived from the same root as
genteel; but nothing can be more distinct from the mere genteel,
than the ideas which enlightened minds associate with these words.
Gentle and gentlemanly mean something kind and genial; genteel,
that which is glittering or gaudy. A person can be a gentleman in
rags, but nobody can be genteel.
{6} The writer has been checked in print by the Scotch with being
a Norfolk man. Surely, surely, these latter times have not been
exactly the ones in which it was expedient for Scotchmen to check
the children of any county in England with the place of their
birth, more especially those who have had the honour of being born
in Norfolk--times in which British fleets, commanded by Scotchmen,
have returned laden with anything but laurels from foreign shores.
It would have been well for Britain had she had the old Norfolk man
to dispatch to the Baltic or the Black sea, lately, instead of
Scotch admirals.
{7} As the present work will come out in the midst of a vehement
political contest, people may be led to suppose that the above was
written expressly for the time. The writer therefore begs to state
that it was written in the year 1854.
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