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- 4434
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.918Z
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- 4383
- text
- of gentlemen, whose order is factitiously perpetuated as race-horses and
lords are in kingly lands; and especially, in those agricultural
districts, where, of a hundred hands, that drop a ballot for the
Presidency, ninety-nine shall be of the brownest and the brawniest; in
such districts, this daintiness of the fingers, when united with a
generally manly aspect, assumes a remarkableness unknown in European
nations.
This most prepossessing form of the clergyman lost nothing by the
character of his manners, which were polished and unobtrusive, but
peculiarly insinuating, without the least appearance of craftiness or
affectation. Heaven had given him his fine, silver-keyed person for a
flute to play on in this world; and he was nearly the perfect master of
it. His graceful motions had the undulatoriness of melodious sounds.
You almost thought you heard, not saw him. So much the wonderful, yet
natural gentleman he seemed, that more than once Mrs. Glendinning had
held him up to Pierre as a splendid example of the polishing and
gentlemanizing influences of Christianity upon the mind and manners;
declaring, that extravagant as it might seem, she had always been of his
father's fancy,--that no man could be a complete gentleman, and preside
with dignity at his own table, unless he partook of the church's
sacraments. Nor in Mr. Falsgrave's case was this maxim entirely absurd.
The child of a poor northern farmer who had wedded a pretty sempstress,
the clergyman had no heraldic line of ancestry to show, as warrant and
explanation of his handsome person and gentle manners; the first, being
the willful partiality of nature; and the second, the consequence of a
scholastic life, attempered by a taste for the choicest female society,
however small, which he had always regarded as the best relish of
existence. If now his manners thus responded to his person, his mind
answered to them both, and was their finest illustration. Besides his
eloquent persuasiveness in the pulpit, various fugitive papers upon
subjects of nature, art, and literature, attested not only his refined
affinity to all beautiful things, visible or invisible; but likewise
that he possessed a genius for celebrating such things, which in a less
indolent and more ambitious nature, would have been sure to have gained
a fair poet's name ere now. For this Mr. Falsgrave was just hovering
upon his prime of years; a period which, in such a man, is the sweetest,
and, to a mature woman, by far the most attractive of manly life. Youth
has not yet completely gone with its beauty, grace, and strength; nor
has age at all come with its decrepitudes; though the finest undrossed
parts of it--its mildness and its wisdom--have gone on before, as
decorous chamberlains precede the sedan of some crutched king.
Such was this Mr. Falsgrave, who now sat at Mrs. Glendinning's breakfast
table, a corner of one of that lady's generous napkins so inserted into
his snowy bosom, that its folds almost invested him as far down as the
table's edge; and he seemed a sacred priest, indeed, breakfasting in his
surplice.
"Pray, Mr. Falsgrave," said Mrs. Glendinning, "break me off a bit of
that roll."
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