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-a-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 addicted to the practice of looking down superciliously even upon the insides themselves as often very suspicious characters, were we voluntarily to court indignities?  If our dress and bearing sheltered us, generally, from the suspicion of being “raff,” (the name at that period for “snobs,"[4]) we really were such constructively, by the place we assumed.  If we did not submit to the deep shadow of eclipse, we entered at least the skirts of its penumbra.  And the analogy of theatres was urged against us, where no man can complain of the annoyances incident to the pit or gallery, having his instant remedy in paying the higher price of the boxes.  But the soundness of this analogy we disputed.  In the case of the theatre, it cannot be pretended that the inferior situations have any separate attractions, unless the pit suits the purpose of the dramatic reporter.  But the reporter or critic is a rarity.  For most people, the sole benefit is in the price.  Whereas, on the contrary, the outside of the mail had its own incommunicable advantages.  These we could not forego.  The higher price we should willingly have paid, but that was connected with the condition of riding inside, which was insufferable.  The air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity to the horses, the elevation of seat—­these were what we desired; but, above all, the certain anticipation of purchasing occasional opportunities of driving.