In Praise of Gentlemen

IT is the thesis of this charmingly written book that with the passing of the idea of being a gentleman purely for the sake of being a gentleman something worthwhile has been lost to civilization. Neither democracies nor dictatorships are friendly to the gentleman.-NYTimes."e;IT is over a hundred years since the last of the Waverley Novels was written, and the mere name of those famous books, which swept down from Edinburgh over England, France, Germany, and Italy, and stirred their generation to wild enthusiasm, helps us to realize the revolution that has metamorphosed social ideas and usages since then. Some of these novels still maintain a foremost place in English literature, and yet the present generation holds them cheap; it reads Rob Roy and The Heart of Midlothian, if at all, as monuments in literary history. And this is due less to a change in literary taste than to the revolution in social usages and ideas. The young generation derides Scott's admiration for high rank in the social hierarchy as snobbery, it calls his loyalties prejudices, it denounces his moral delicacy as puritanical prudery; it measures them by its own standards, its own usages, its own ideas, and finds them wanting. It would be idle to speculate whether their standards or those of Sir Walter are more conducive to general happiness. In any event, the change is historically interesting and has its place in the story of civilization."e;-Introduction.