delf ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been held to
attaint the foot concerned in that operation; so that, perhaps, it would
have required an act of parliament to restore its purity of blood. What
words, then, could express the horror, and the sense of treason, in that
case, which _had_ happened, where all three outsides, the trinity of
Pariahs, made a vain attempt to sit down at the same breakfast table or
dinner table with the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt;
and on that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavored to soothe his
three holy associates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted
for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as
a case of lunacy (or _delirium tremens_) rather than of treason. England
owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her
social composition. I am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes
it expressed itself in extravagant shapes. The course taken with the
infatuated outsiders, in the particular attempt which I have noticed, was,
that the waiter, beckoning them away from the privileged _salle-à-manger_,
sang out, "This way, my good men;" and then enticed them away off to the
kitchen. But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though very
rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger than usual, or
more vicious than usual, resolutely refused to move, and so far carried
their point, as to have a separate table arranged for themselves in a
corner of the room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found ample enough
to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table, or _dais_, it then
became possible to assume as a fiction of law--that the three delf fellows,
after all, were not present. They could be ignored by the porcelain men,
under the maxim, that objects not appearing, and not existing, are governed
by the same logical construction.

Such now being, at that time, the usages of mail-coaches, what was to be
done by us of young Oxford? We, the most aristocratic of people, who were