[73] He also takes precedence of the bishop. An intimate friend of mine was appointed to a prefecture. On his arrival the archbishop sent to say that he would receive him at his palace. This was an attempt to put the prefect in an inferior position, so he answered that it was not further from the palace to the prefecture than from the prefecture to the palace. The archbishop then came.
[74] George du Maurier attributes this happiness in the wealth of others to what he calls “The British Passion for inequality,” illustrated by him in Punch. An Englishman is walking with a Frenchman in Hyde Park, and gives utterance to that passion in these words:—
“Sturdy Briton. It’s all very well to turn up your nose at your own beggarly Counts and Barons, Mossoo! But you can’t find fault with our nobility! Take a man like our Dook o’ Bayswater, now! Why, he could buy up your Foreign Dukes and Princes by the dozen! and as for you and me, he’d look upon us as so much dirt beneath his feet! Now, that’s something like a nobleman, that is! That’s a kind o’ nobleman that I, as an Englishman, feel as I’ve got some right to be proud of!”
[75] The want of money, in these days, very frequently induces a French nobleman to marry an heiress in the middle classes. This is the most powerful cause of infractions of French exclusiveness.
[76] The essential difference between the scientific and the religious views is that the one sees a special Providential commission, where the other only perceives an undesigned accumulation of natural force.
[77] There is more English poetry of the same order, for example the following, also quoted from Mr. Gerald Massey—
“Oh! this world might be lighted
With Eden’s first smile—
Angel-haunted—unblighted,
With Freedom for Toil: