But here among the youth of Friarton, which was not golden, or even gilded, a bad style of practical joking and buffoonery—gone out elsewhere save in the worst style of regiment; the boisterous rendering of the mock heroic and still more excruciating comic songs of the lower order of theatres; and a good deal of rude wrangling for lack of a better mode of argument, traversing the horse-play and threatening now and then to terminate in the rowdyism of a free fight, formed the sole alternatives to sheer noise. These young shopmen, who were very ordinary lads, were nearly a century behind their social superiors in superficial civilisation. Oliver used to compare his class sorrowfully to those nations in Europe like the Poles and Hungarians kept back to do the needful work of repelling the hordes of Eastern barbarians, and apparently never able to make up for lost time. Oliver Constable did not for a moment imagine that the upper classes enjoyed a monopoly or even a predominance of moral and intellectual gifts. But the truth was pressed home upon him painfully, that while genius, which is above all accident of circumstances, and which is its own teacher, is rare, cultivation tells in producing a higher average of second-rate ability, or the specious appearance of it, in the better educated grades of society. And where the _matter_ is not of the best, the _manner_ always plays an overweening part. There did not happen to be a ‘mute inglorious Milton’ in Friarton in those days, so Oliver missed the intelligent echoes of the Marvels and Butlers of the period, which he had been accustomed to hear at Oxford. Even with their aid he had been apt to get tired of youthful gaieties, and to call them intolerably flippant and shallow, but, in contrast with his former experience, the clumsy gambols of the Friarton lads were dull as ditch water. Oliver could not have stood them long, had it not been for the strength of his purpose and that higher humanity which awoke in him such sympathy with his kind, above all with the class in which it seemed to Oliver his chief responsibilities were to be found. It was slow uphill work to win influence and lull antagonism. Jack Dadd had made use, more than once in Oliver’s hearing, of bad language. Happily for Jack himself, he had no real relish for it; he employed it as an evidence of knowingness and spirit in the light in which many swearers indulged in profane swearing in the great swearing age. Some melancholy prophets report there are ominous symptoms, in high places, of the return of this epoch, but we must humbly trust that the blooming time of blasphemy was a century ago. At last Oliver interfered: ‘Dadd, will you do me the favour not to say that again in my hearing?’ Oliver requested, quietly.