conversation equally lucky occasions for the introduction of that which he has to say.  The favorites of society, and what it calls whole souls, are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the company, contented and contenting, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury, a water-party or a shooting-match.  England, which is rich in gentlemen, furnished, in the beginning of the present century, a good model of that genius which the world loves, in Mr. Fox,[428] who added to his great abilities the most social disposition, and real love of men.  Parliamentary history has few better passages than the debate, in which Burke[429] and Fox separated in the House of Commons; when Fox urged on his old friend the claims of old friendship with such tenderness, that the house was moved to tears.  Another anecdote is so close to my matter, that I must hazard the story.  A tradesman who had long dunned him for a note of three hundred guineas, found him one day counting gold, and demanded payment.  “No,” said Fox, “I owe this money to Sheridan[430]:  it is a debt of honor:  if an accident should happen to me, he has nothing to show.”  “Then,” said the creditor, “I change my debt into a debt of honor,” and tore the note in pieces.  Fox thanked the man for his confidence, and paid him, saying, “his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan must wait.”  Lover of liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African slave, he possessed a great personal popularity; and Napoleon said of him on the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, “Mr. Fox will always hold the first place in an assembly at the Tuileries.”

17.  We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy, whenever we insist on benevolence as its foundation.  The painted phantasm Fashion rises to cast a species of derision on what we say.  But I will neither be driven from some allowance to Fashion as a symbolic institution, nor from the belief that love is the basis of courtesy.  “We must obtain that, if we can; but by all means we must affirm this.  Life owes much of its spirit to these sharp contrasts.  Fashion which affects to be honor, is often, in all men’s experience, only a ballroom code.  Yet, so long as it is the highest circle, in the imagination of the best heads on the planet, there is something necessary and excellent in it; for it is not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous; and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which details of high life are read, betray the universality of the love of cultivated manners.  I know that a comic disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged ’first circles,’ and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, and benefit, to the individuals actually found there.  Monarchs and heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants are not.  Fashion has many classes and many rules