Now how different all this is, when a man of social grit thrusts himself into a drawing-room, and with an easy audacity tosses out disagreeable facts and unfashionable truths, the porcelain crashing as his words fall, and saying everything that no gentleman ought to say, indifferent to the titter or terror of the women and the offended looks and frightened stare of the men. How the gilded lies vanish in his presence! How he states, contradicts, confutes! how he smashes through proprieties to realities, flooding the room with his aggressive vitality, mastering by main force a position in the most exclusive set, and, by being perfectly indifferent to their opinion, making it impossible for them to put him down! He thus becomes a social power by becoming a social rebel,--persecutes conventional politeness into submission to rude veracity,--establishes an autocracy of man over the gentleman,--and practises a kind of "Come-Outerism," while insisting on enjoying all the advantages of _Go-Interism_. Ben Jonson in the age of Elizabeth, Samuel Johnson in the last century, Carlyle and Brougham in the present, are prominent examples of this somewhat insolent manhood in the presence of social forms. It is, however, one of the rarest, as it is one of the ugliest, kinds of human strength; it requires, perhaps, in its combination, full as many defects as merits; and how difficult is its justifiable exercise we see in the career of so illustrious a philanthropist as Wilberforce,--a man whose speech in Parliament showed no lack of vivid conceptions and smiting words, a man whom no threats of personal violence could intimidate, and who would cheerfully have risked his life for his cause, yet still a man who could never forget that he was a Tory and a gentleman, who had no grit before lords and ladies, whose Abolitionism was not sufficiently blunt and downright in the good company of cabinet ministers, whose sensitive nature flinched at the thought of being conscientiously impolite and heroically ill-natured, and whose manners were thus frequently in the way of the full efficiency of his morals. In many respects a hero, in all respects benevolent, he still was not like Romilly, a man of grit. Politeness has been defined as benevolence in small things. To be benevolent in great things, decorum must sometimes yield to duty; and Draco, though in the king's drawing-room, and loyally supporting in Parliament the measures of the ministry, is still Draco, though cruelty in him has learned the dialect of fashion and clothed itself in the privileges of the genteel.