Some family tradition of wealth or distinction is apt to be at the bottom
of it, and it survives all the advantages that used to set it off. I
like family pride as well as my neighbors, and respect the high-born
fellow-citizen whose progenitors have not worked in their shirt-sleeves
for the last two generations full as much as I ought to. But grand pere
oblige; a person with a known grandfather is too distinguished to find it
necessary to put on airs. The few Royal Princes I have happened to know
were very easy people to get along with, and had not half the social
knee-action I have often seen in the collapsed dowagers who lifted their
eyebrows at me in my earlier years.
--My heart does not warm as it should do towards the persons, not
intimates, who are always too glad to see me when we meet by accident,
and discover all at once that they have a vast deal to unbosom themselves
of to me.
--There is one blameless person whom I cannot love and have no excuse for
hating. It is the innocent fellow-creature, otherwise inoffensive to me,
whom I find I have involuntarily joined on turning a corner. I suppose
the Mississippi, which was flowing quietly along, minding its own
business, hates the Missouri for coming into it all at once with its
muddy stream. I suppose the Missouri in like manner hates the
Mississippi for diluting with its limpid, but insipid current the rich
reminiscences of the varied soils through which its own stream has
wandered.
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