who plants shade-trees for the second and third generation, and orchards when he is grown old; some well-concealed piety; some just man happy in an ill-fame; some youth ashamed of the favors of fortune, and impatiently casting them on other shoulders.  And these are the centers of society, on which it returns for fresh impulses.  These are the creators of Fashion, which is an attempt to organize beauty of behavior.  The beautiful and the generous are in the theory, the doctors and apostles of this church:  Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and Washington, and every pure and valiant heart, who worshiped Beauty by word and by deed.  The persons who constitute the natural aristocracy, are not found in the actual aristocracy, or only on its edge; as the chemical energy of the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of the spectrum.  Yet that is the infirmity of the seneschals, who do not know their sovereign, when he appears.  The theory of society supposes the existence and sovereignty of these.  It divines afar off their coming.  It says with the elder gods,—­

    “As Heaven and Earth are fairer far[438]
    Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
    And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth,
    In form and shape compact and beautiful;
    So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads;
    A power, more strong in beauty, born of us,
    And fated to excel us, as we pass
    In glory that old Darkness: 
     ... for, ’tis the eternal law,
    That first in beauty shall be first in might.”

19.  Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society, there is a narrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and flower of courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and reference, as to its inner and imperial court, the parliament of love and chivalry.  And this is constituted of those persons in whom heroic dispositions are native, with the love of beauty, the delight in society, and the power to embellish the passing day.  If the individuals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review, in such manner as that we could, leisurely and critically, inspect their behavior, we might find no gentleman, and no lady; for although excellent specimens of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars, we should detect offense.  Because, elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth.  There must be romance of character, or the most fastidious exclusion of impertinencies will not avail.  It must be genius which takes that direction:  it must be not courteous, but courtesy.  High behavior is as rare in fiction as it is in fact.  Scott is praised for the fidelity with which he painted the demeanor and conversation of the superior classes.  Certainly, kings and queens, nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity that had been put in their