of art, or how great the work they did may be—if I knew a man who did a thing like that, I should be forced to consider him a low cad—no matter how great a poet or a writer, or how great his work might be—I should consider him a cad, —and”—his old growling voice fell to a whisper of boding and implacable judgment—“I should tell him so, sir. I should let him know that I considered him a cad.”
Such was Joel’s grandsire, Mr. Joel, and surely he was a specimen of which any group or class could well be proud: of all that Hudson River aristocracy he was justly venerated and esteemed as one of its noblest and proudest adornments. He had lived a long, honourable, and successful life; and now in his old age he had retired to the bosom of his paternal earth to spend his last years in dignity and simple ease and in calm but fruitful reflection on his rich experience. He was writing a book, and in advance it could be solemnly averred that he would make no use in it of any letters that a woman ever wrote to him.
What man, therefore, could speak with greater weight about the duties, codes and principles of man? What man was better qualified to know the rules of honour and the standards of a gentleman—and to assert a truth that might have gone unnoticed by a person of a baser spirit and a lower quality—that Rousseau was a scoundrel and De Musset and Lord Byron a couple of low cads—“because, sir, they made public letters that a woman wrote them.”
It was indeed delightful to find such Thackerayan gallantry, such Olympian scorn for knavish genius and for the lives of mighty poets dead and gone who illuminated mankind with their radiance but had their own light put out—must dwell for evermore “a couple of low cads,” in outer darkness, never again to be received, acknowledged, given gracious pardon by the chivalric flower of the Hudson River rich. How wretched that stern judgment must have made Rousseau! What bitter news for Byron! What misery for De Musset!
But now a woman servant entered and announced that lunch was served. The chattering groups of people turned and formed instinctively, and by a kind of native respect, into files of deferential waiting, until Mr. Joel had passed. He led the way, a grand and leonine old man, superbly garmented in a coat of soft, rich blue, wide loose white flannels, wound at the waist by a great sash of yellow silk—an adornment that seemed in no way inappropriate but superbly fitting the noble dignity of the old man.
At the door he paused and stood aside, with a grizzled majesty of courtesy,
