For many years I have been trying to understand the jargon of Respectability, and I have failed. I cannot get three people in one room to entirely agree as to the constituents of a lady or a gentleman. One will tell me that the claim to the distinction depends upon birth; another denies this, and says it is simply a matter of good manners; but a third, in spite of my protest that the manners of my housemaid betoken a _gentle_-woman, affirms that her social status debars a domestic servant from the label _lady_, though she may be a very well-behaved young woman. If you think it is easy to obtain a precise definition of lady and gentleman, I suggest that you interrogate your near acquaintances, and make notes of the answers. Perchance your luck is better than mine. No, I do not to this day know exactly what people mean by calling this man _gentleman_ and that man plain _man_. I have heard that there was a time when only those men who plundered the poor, swore "gad-zooks" and very much worse than that, got drunk nearly every night, and debauched a great number of maids were the only respectable gentlemen in the land, all the rest, who were not "up to" this "form" in usual practice being churls, and knaves, and clowns. It is a matter of history that these crapulous bandits were the only gentlemen of their day. But take the phrase in its most modern sense. A. is a patrician, and therefore pre-eminently a gentleman in the esteem of tens of thousands. He uses the foulest back-slum expressions in the hunting-field, "pals" with harlots, gamblers of shady notoriety, and ruffianly hybrid sportsmen of the turf and ring, drinks to excess, and, after a career of low vice and mean trickery, he pays his creditors--many of them struggling tradesmen--sixpence in the pound, or less than that. _You_ say he is no gentleman. Quite so; but he is received in that polite company where you and I would be cold-shouldered, and the society that receives him is undoubtedly very high and good society. Moreover, the Respectable million, though they may roll their eyes unctuously at his misconduct, would be extremely delighted to have the honour of entertaining Lord A. at afternoon tea. You know perfectly well, my friend, that his lordship is "a gentleman bred and born," and that circles closed to B., an impecunious artist, but a man of exemplary deportment and refinement of feeling, are open to Lord A.