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CHAPTER IX.

AFFAIRS OF HONOUR.- WELLINGTON AND DUTY. CHARACTER OF MR. RICHARD MARTIN.-GENSDARMERIE AT A SHIPWRECK. LOUIS NAPOLEON. PRESENTATION TO PIUS VII. - ANECDOTE OF AN ETON EXAMINATION.

A GENTLEMAN holding the rank of colonel during one of the South American revolutionary wars, told me, that, on joining the corps, he was obliged, like a school-boy in his first half, to run the gauntlet, as it were, through the mess, not with a desire or view to be cock-of-the-walk, but in sheer selfdefence, and, as he oddly expressed it, for a quiet life. It is not difficult to understand how the sad necessity may arise among a motley semi-barbarous assemblage of adventurers, but it can find no proper place in civilized circles.

Our Duke, going directly to the point, and no mistake, individualising his national proverb, "We will have no little war," and insisting on its practical application to the mess-room, has long since stifled any obtrusion into conversation of the truism, that an officer, being a "gentleman by profession," may call out, and must be answered by a gentleman, and other remarks symptomatic of its being a military duty to keep up the honour of their cloth, by a normal exercise of those very equivocal privileges, both as between each other, and as against general society.

The effect has been very civilizing. John Bull always prefers professional advice when it is to be had, and will have the best at any cost, and for the quasi official regulation of the law and etiquette of quarrel, he naturally looks up to those whose business is fighting. Happily John has found in the Duke of Wellington a living authority, to

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whose competency in these questions history will testify, whenever the sad day arrives in which his personal influence shall be lost to us. We do not now so often hear of parties, standing on the debatable border of good society, taking out their patent of gentility at Kensington Gravel Pits, by calling out an officer.

Among the first of the last dying speeches of the system (for like those of a criminal, there are more than one dying speech in circulation) which threw a ridicule over it, was the case in which an improving tenant called out an improving landlord, and the last, of a decidedly bullying character, was the broad hint by the editor, that the gentlemen of the press fought--rather a shock to the gentlemen of the mess of the old school, but it passed for only as much as it was worth, and was quizzed as a gratis advertisement of the gentility of the fourth estate, which had better have been left alone, but

in its passage, the ridicule it excited caused no little unintentional good to the antiduelling society, for it would be a far worse world than it is, if public men were not sometimes the culpable cause of good, as well as the innocent cause of evil.

And, further, the dictum has been given in the only form in which authority, if it is not tired of office, if it wishes to preserve its characteristics, should enunciate its opinion, namely the imperative; any other mood will always be considered by those subject to it, as a dodge on the part of its vacillating representatives to shirk responsibility.

Let me elucidate my meaning, by an experience. Constrained by the falseness of their position, expected to command, ex cathedra, when but half-clothed with ill-defined authority. I have heard-of foremen informing their younger fellow-labourers in the vineyard, that there were many things

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they did not enjoin, they only recommended. I have seen the eagerness with which those on their promotion, zealous without judgment, well-intentioned without knowledge, sucked in every word, showing that they thought more was meant than met the ear, and that forward was the covert order. I have known, that, before a year was over their heads, the puzzled and repugnant labourers were forbidden, with how little weight of authority may be easily imagined, the performance of what was so recommended, or rather what vague expressions caused to be so interpreted.

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Grey-headed reformers, of whatever degree, may take this as a truth, that when old judgment stirs up young zeal, young zeal will run old judgment out of sight, and their youthful reminiscences must satisfy them, that a hint to young blood will make it boil over, while the veins of the exciting cause are stagnant. "Messieurs," as Prince

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