vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vii.
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We ought always in pure English to use the term "good breeding" literally; and to say "good nurture" for what we usually mean by good breeding. Given the race and make of the animal, you may turn it to good or bad account; you may spoil your good dog or colt, and make him as vicious as you choose, or break his back at once by ill-usage; and you may, on the other hand, make something serviceable and respectable out of your poor cur and colt if you educate them carefully; but ill-bred they will both of them be to their lives' end; and the best you will ever be able to say of them is, that they are useful, and decently behaved, ill-bred creatures.
An error, which is associated with the truth, and which makes it always look weak and disputable, is the confusion of race with name; and the supposition that the blood of a family must still be good, if its genealogy be unbroken and its name not lost, though sire and son have been indulging age after age in habits involving perpetual degeneracy of race. Of course it is equally an error to suppose that, because a man's name is common, his blood must be base; since his family may have been ennobling it by pureness of moral habit for many generations, and yet may not have got any title, or other sign of nobleness, attached to their names. Nevertheless, the probability is always in favour of the race which has had acknowledged supremacy, and in which every motive leads to the endeavour to preserve its true nobility.
Modern Painters,
vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vii. § 3 n.
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The old English rough proverb is irrevocably true,—you can make no silk purse of a sow's ear. And this great truth also holds—though it is a disagreeable one to look full in the face—that, named or nameless, no man can make himself a gentleman who was not born one. If he lives a right life, and cultivates all the powers, and yet more all the sensibilities, he is born with, and chooses his wife well, his own son will be more a gentleman than he is, and he may see yet better blood than his son's in his grandchild's cheeks, but he must be content to remain a clown himself—if he was born a clown.
Modern Painters,
vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vii. § 3 n.