cottage, and find a farmer who feels that he is the man I have come to see, and fronts me accordingly.  It was therefore a very natural point of old feudal etiquette, that a gentleman who received a visit, though it were of his sovereign, should not leave his roof, but should wait his arrival at the door of his house.  No house, though it were the Tuileries,[415] or the Escurial,[416] is good for anything without a master.  And yet we are not often gratified by this hospitality.  Everybody we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guests.  Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full renconter front to front with his fellow?  It were unmerciful, I know, quite to abolish the use of these screens, which are of eminent convenience, whether the guest is too great, or too little.  We call together many friends who keep each other in play, or by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young people, and guard our retirement.  Or if, perchance, a searching realist comes to our gate, before whose eyes we have no care to stand, then again we run to our curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam[417] at the voice of the Lord God in the garden.  Cardinal Caprara,[418] the Pope’s[419] legate at Paris, defended himself from the glances of Napoleon, by an immense pair of green spectacles.  Napoleon remarked them, and speedily managed to rally them off:  and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough, with eight hundred thousand troops at his back, to face a pair of free-born eyes, but fenced himself with etiquette, and within triple barriers of reserve:  and, as all the world knows from Madame de Stael,[420] was wont, when he found himself observed, to discharge his face of all expression.  But emperors and rich men are by no means the most skillful masters of good manners.  No rent roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulations:  and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all forms of good-breeding point that way.

12.  I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt’s[421] translation, Montaigne’s[422] account of his journey into Italy, and am struck with nothing more agreeably than the self-respecting fashions of the time.  His arrival in each place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is an event of some consequence.  Wherever he goes, he pays a visit to whatever prince or gentleman of note resides upon his road, as a duty to himself and to civilization.  When he leaves any house in which he has lodged for a few weeks, he causes his arms to be painted and hung up as a perpetual sign to the house, as was the custom of gentlemen.