cordiality was all for the man of letters, who did not contest his
family rank with him, and the polite formality all for the man of
title, who did--you discovered where and how he was proud in an
instant. Here lay his fretful point. The aristocracy of rank, as
separate from the aristocracy of ancestry, was no aristocracy for
_him._ He was jealous of it; he hated it. Commoner though he was, he
considered himself the social superior of any man, from a baronet up
to a duke, whose family was less ancient than his own.

Among a host of instances of this peculiar pride of his which I could
cite, I remember one, characteristic enough to be taken as a sample of
all the rest. It happened when I was quite a child, and was told me by
one of my uncles now dead--who witnessed the circumstance himself, and
always made a good story of it to the end of his life.

A merchant of enormous wealth, who had recently been raised to the
peerage, was staying at one of our country houses. His daughter, my
uncle, and an Italian Abbe were the only guests besides. The merchant
was a portly, purple-faced man, who bore his new honours with a
curious mixture of assumed pomposity and natural good-humour. The Abbe
was dwarfish and deformed, lean, sallow, sharp-featured, with bright
bird-like eyes, and a low, liquid voice. He was a political refugee,
dependent for the bread he ate, on the money he received for teaching
languages. He might have been a beggar from the streets; and still my
father would have treated him as the principal guest in the house, for
this all-sufficient reason--he was a direct descendant of one of the
oldest of those famous Roman families whose names are part of the
history of the Civil Wars in Italy.

On the first day, the party assembled for dinner comprised the