of Rome, and in the purlieus of great mansions.  Mr Coleridge, who had seen nothing but superior amiableness in the familiar sort of friendship existing between a French gentleman and his servant, where, in fact, it had survived as a relic from old political degradations, might consistently proclaim in rapture, when writing to a lady upon the Philosophic Dialogues of Cicero, “What perfect gentlemen were[8] these old Romans!” He who suffers a single feature of amiableness to screen the general misconstruction of social relations, may easily find a spirit of chivalrous courtesy in what, after all, was only a self-protecting meanness, applied to one special case of private intercourse under a brutalizing system applied to all other intercourse between men of public distinction.  It is certain that the prevailing relations upon the Continent between master and servant, did, before the French Revolution, and do still, express a vicious structure of society; they have repeated, in other forms, the Roman type of civilisation; whilst we, with a sterner exterior, have been the first to stamp respectability upon menial and mechanic labour.

[Footnote 8:  And, in reality, this impression, as from some high-bred courtesy and self-restraint, is likely enough to arise at first in every man’s mind.  But the true ground of the amiable features was laid for the Roman in the counter-force of exquisite brutality.  Where the style of public intercourse had been so deformed by ruffianism, in private intercourse it happened, both as a natural consequence, and as a difference sought after by prudence, that the tendencies to such rough play incident to all polemic conversation (as in the De Oratore) should be precluded by a marked extremity of refined pleasure.  Hence indeed it is, that compliments, and something like mutual adulation, prevail so much in the imaginary colloquies of Roman statesmen.  The personal flatteries interchanged in the De Oratore, De Legibus, &c., of Cicero, are often so elegantly turned, and introduced so artfully, that they read very much like the high bred compliments ascribed to Louis XIV., in his intercourse with eminent public officers.  These have generally a regal air of loftiness about them, and prove the possibility of genius attaching even to the art of paying compliments.  But else, in reviewing the spirit of traffic, which appears in the reciprocal flatteries passing between Crassus, Antony, Cotta, &c., too often a sullen suspicion crosses the mind of a politic sycophancy, adopted on both sides as a defensive armour.]