Here at least--for there are twelve passengers present--the insides and the outsides have foregathered, and for once the gulf socially dividing them has been bridged. This generally impassable gulf was more marked in the case of the mails than in that of the stage-coaches. The very superior and exclusive travellers who went in their own chariots or by post-chaise resorted to well-known hotels and posting-houses on the roads, whose chaste halls were never profaned by coaches. Even the superior persons who travelled inside the mails could not hope to win to those expensive and select abiding-places; but they formed a caste by themselves, who never willingly sat at meat with the outsides. De Quincey, who often travelled outside, experienced something of this contempt, and the recollection seems to have lent eloquence to his remarks on the subject. It was, he tells us, “The fixed assumption of the four inside people that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable delf-ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation, so that perhaps it would have required an Act of Parliament to restore its purity of blood. What words, then, could express the horror and the sense of treason in that case, which _had_ happened, where all three outsides (the trinity of Pariahs) made a vain attempt to sit down at the same breakfast-table or dinner-table with the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy associates by suggesting that if the outsides were indicted for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of lunacy or delirium tremens rather than that of treason. England owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her social composition when pulling against her own strong democracy. I am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes, undoubtedly, it expressed itself in comic shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the particular attempt which I have noticed, was that the waiter, beckoning them away from the privileged _salle-à-manger_, sang out, ‘This way, my good men,’ and then enticed these good men away to the kitchen. But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger than usual, or more vicious than usual, resolutely refused to budge, and so far carried their point as to have a separate table arranged for themselves in a corner of the general room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table or dais, it then became possible to assume as a fiction of law that the three delf fellows after all were not present. They could be ignored by the