The Anatomy of Melancholy

Do not be ashamed of your birth, then: you are a gentleman throughout the world and will be honoured. As for him, strip him of his fine clothes and deprive him of his wealth, and he is a mere mushroom—as Polynices discovered in exile, when his gentility counted for nothing—like a foreign coin that no one will accept; he will be despised.

Once again, though you are a barbarian born at Tontonteac, a serf, a slave, a Black African from Saldania, or an uncultivated Virginian at Dasamonquepeuc, and he a French monsieur, a Spanish don, or an Italian signor—I do not care what his ancestry, family, or rank may be, baron, count, or prince—if you have good qualities and he has none, but is a degenerate Neoptolemus, I tell you in a word: you are a man, and he is a beast.

Let no son of the soil or upstart crow over what I have said, and no worthy gentleman take offence. I do not say it to disparage those who deserve well and are truly virtuous and noble. I greatly respect and honour true gentry and nobility. I myself was born to parents of good standing, in an old family, but I am a younger brother: it does not concern me.

Even had I been some great heir, richly endowed, with my present outlook I should not have been puffed up at all. I should have valued it like every other human happiness, honours, and so on: they come to an end; they are fragile and unstable.

As the writer said of that great river, the Danube: it rises from a small spring, at first a little brook, sometimes broad, sometimes narrow, now slow, then swift; at last, swollen to an incredible size by the meeting of sixty navigable rivers, it vanishes, loses its name, and is suddenly swallowed by the Black Sea. I may say the same of our greatest families. Humble at first, enlarged by rich marriages, purchases, and offices, they last for a few ages, with small changes in circumstances, fortunes, places, and so on. Then, through some prodigal son, some failure, or the lack of an heir, they are effaced in an instant and their memory blotted out.

Meanwhile I grant this much to good birth: if a man descends from parents of honourable or noble standing, he will show it in his character.

For fierce eagles Do not breed doves.

Although the nobility of our times much resemble our coins—greater in number and nominal value, but less in weight and quality, with finer stamps, engravings, or surfaces than of old—if a man retains those ancient marks of true gentility, he will be more affable, courteous, and kindly, better behaved and tempered, or of a more magnanimous, heroic, and generous spirit than the common mass of men, those ordinary boors and peasants, “who are generally so wicked, rustic, and uncultivated, not to say malicious, that they would show no one any kindness, not even God himself if he came,” as one writer observes of them: a rude, brutish, uncivil, wild, snarling breed, cruel and malicious, incapable of instruction, and scarcely possessed of common sense.