They are not better, nor wiser in their generation (forbid it, Manchester!), nor even more daring in confronting danger than the thousands whose grandsires are creations of a powerful fancy or of a complaisant king-at-arms.  In that terrible charge which swept away the Russian cavalry at Eylau, three lengths in front of the best blood in France rode the innkeeper’s son.  The “First Grenadier” himself was not more splendidly reckless, though he was a La Tour d’Auvergne.  But in passive uncomplaining endurance, in the power of obliterating outward tokens of suffering, physical or mental, may we not still say, Noblesse oblige?

Hundreds of similar isolated instances may be quoted from the annals of the Third Estate; but, in the class I speak of, this quality seems a sixth sense wholly independent of, and often contradicting the rest of the individual’s disposition.

I remember meeting in France an old Italian refugee.  He had not much principle and very little pride; he was ready quidvis facere aut pati to get a five-franc piece, which he would incontinently stake and lose at baccarat or ecarte, as he had done aforetime with a large ancestral inheritance; but his quiet fortitude under privations that were neither few nor light was worthy of Belisarius.

Very often, I am sure, his evening meal must have been eaten with the Barmecide; but his pale, handsome face, finished off so gracefully by the white, pointed beard, still met you, courteous and unruffled, the idea of an exiled doge, or a Rohan in disgrace.  Once only I saw him moved—­when the landlord of our inn, a vast bloated bourgeois, smote the Count familiarly on the shoulder, and bantered him pleasantly on the brilliant prospects of his eldest son.  It was not unkindly meant, perhaps, but the old man shrunk away from the large fat hand as if it hurt him, and turned toward us a look piteously appealing, which was not lost on myself or Livingstone.  When mine host, later in the evening, shook in his gouty slippers before an ebullition of Guy’s wrath, excited by the most shadowy pretext, I wonder if he guessed at the remote cause of that outpouring of the vials?  Count Massa did, for he smiled intensely, as only an Italian can smile when amply revenged.

One instance more to close a long digression.  I have read of a baron in the fifteenth century who once in his life said a good thing.  He was a coarse, brutal marauder, illiterate enough to have satisfied Earl Angus, and as unromantic as the Integral Calculus.  He was mortally wounded in a skirmish; and when his men came back from the pursuit, he was bleeding to death, resting against a tree.  When they lifted him up, they noticed his eyes fixed with a curious, complacent expression on the red stream that surged and gurgled out of his wound, just as a gourmand looks at a bumper of a rare vintage held up to the light.  They heard him growl to himself, “Qu’il coule rouge et fort, le bon vieux sang de Bourgogne.”  And then he fell back—­dead.