As I was taking my ticket for a second-class passage to the nearest point on the railway to Olney, I happened to meet a gentleman who had just bought his, and with whom I had the pleasure of some acquaintance. Knowing him to be connected, by marriage and position, with some of the most aristocratic families in the kingdom, I very naturally said to him—“I’m going the same way with you, but shall lose the pleasure of your company, for I’ve only a second-class ticket.” I was amused with his answer:—“Yes, for I’ve only a _third_-class ticket.” He briefly explained that he was forced to economize, and that, although he did not like it, the inconvenience of a seat among a low-class of people, for a short time, was not so intolerable as a collapsed purse, “especially” he added, “as I am thus enabled to travel in the first-class carriages when I travel with my wife.” Such is the independence as to action, and the freedom as to confession of economy, which characterize a well-bred man, whose position in society is settled; and I could not but think how snobbish, in the contrast, is the conduct of many of my own countrymen, who, if they ever use prudence, in their expenses, are afraid to have it known. An aristocracy of money is not only contemptible in itself, but it curses a land with a universal shame of seeming prudent. It makes the dollared upstart fancy himself a gentleman, while the true gentleman is degraded in his own eyes, as well as in the estimation of the vulgar, by the fact, that his house is small, his furniture plain, and his table frugal. Hence so much _upholstery_ in America; so much hotel-life; and such a contempt for quiet respectability. This anecdote is not out of place in a chapter devoted to Cowper. The poet was a man of gentle blood, and, in every sense of the word, a gentleman. Many an English nobleman is vastly inferior to him in point of extraction. He was descended from the blood-royal of Henry Third, and in divers ways was allied to the old aristocracy of England. He used to be visited at Olney, by persons of quality, in their chariots; and titled ladies were glad to accept his hospitalities. But his home at Olney, where he lived for years, was one of the humblest in the place, and even his darling residence, at Weston, was such a dwelling as most country-parsons would consider barely comfortable. Now, I do not mean to say that John Bull prefers such an establishment for a gentlemen’s habitation; but I do mean that nobody in England would be so insane as to think less of a gentleman, for living thus humbly, especially if he lived so from principle.