I say, if you like such people, go with them.But I am going to make a practical application of the example at the beginning of this particular record, which some young people who are going to choose professional advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for.If you are making choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if possible, with a cheerful and serene countenance.A physician is not--at least, ought not to be--an executioner; and a sentence of death on his face is as bad as a warrant for execution signed by the Governor.As a general rule, no man has a right to tell another by word or look that he is going to die.It may be necessary in some extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last extreme of impertinence which one human being can offer to another."You have killed me,"said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told him he was incurable.He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead in six' weeks.If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone, persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought to know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of hope of recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long as life is comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of heaven, or at least of rest, when life has become a burden which the bearer is ready to let fall.
Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death.The chance of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a certain time is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse people.As you go down the social scale, you reach a point at length where the common talk in sick rooms is of churchyards and sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual vivisection is forever carried on, upon the person of the miserable sufferer.
And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer the one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body.If you can get along with people who carry a certificate in their faces that their goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your children cannot.And whatever offends one of these little ones cannot be right in the eyes of Him who loved them so well.
After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably select gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then all will be right.
This repetition of the above words,--gentleman and lady,--which could not be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are made of them by those who ought to know what they mean.Thus, at a marriage ceremony, once, of two very excellent persons who had been at service, instead of, Do you take this man, etc.? and, Do you take this woman? how do you think the officiating clergyman put the questions? It was, Do you, Miss So and So, take this GENTLEMAN?
and, Do you, Mr.This or That, take this LADY?! What would any English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England herself, have thought, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her and her bridegroom anything but plain woman and man at such a time?
I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered these monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized upon many of the persons who were present,--had guessed what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,--so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,--the good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that superb and full-blown vulgarism.Any persons whom it could please could have no better notion of what the words referred to signify than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.
MAN! Sir! WOMAN! Sir! Gentility is a fine thing, not to be undervalued, as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes before that.
"When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?"The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from the finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat is below a certain level.Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and all the graceful ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the surface, the elegances and suavities of life die out one by one as we sink through the social scale.Fortunately, the virtues are more tenacious of life, and last pretty well until we get down to the mud of absolute pauperism, where they do not flourish greatly.
--I had almost forgotten about our boarders.As the Model of all the Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is the reason we are not all very sorry.Surely we all like good persons.She is a good person.Therefore we like her.--Only we don't.
This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the principle which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit and embodied in the lines by which Dr.Fell is made unamiably immortal, this syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had occasion to construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as I have done for the Model."Pious and painefull." Why has that excellent old phrase gone out of use? Simply because these good painefull or painstaking persons proved to be such nuisances in the long run, that the word "painefull" came, before people thought of it, to mean pain-giving instead of painstaking.
--So, the old fellah's off to-morrah,--said the young man John.
Old fellow?--said I,--whom do you mean?
Why, the one that came with our little beauty, the old fellah in petticoats.
