Note 209:1 — Chapter XIV

The confidence with which the great aristocracy of birth mingled with whatever elements it thought fit, is perhaps the best evidence of the security it felt in the haughty and arbitrary exercise of its established privileges. With all this free equality of social intercourse, however, there must have been something yet left to which the mere guest was not admitted, and to which he never aspired. Without this, it seems impossible that Actors,—menials by the etiquette of the court, anathematized by the church, held incapable of giving evidence in some courts of law as persons of infamous profession,—should have been so much sought after and caressed. Thus the Le Kains, Fleurys, and Prévilles, among the men; the Sophy Arnoulds, Dumesnils, Clairons, among the women, many of them thorough profligates, are to be found haunting places surrounded by the highest lustre of adventitious rank, busying themselves with state secrets, mingling in family disputes, and always with the easy assurance of their profession. This state of matters could not have existed unless the aristocracy, notwithstanding the ease with which they permitted themselves to be approached, were able effectually to mark precisely the point where the advance was to stop, and could feel themselves among persons, who, like old family servants, never presume upon familiarity. In admitting to social intercourse, however, a person of Hume's dignity of character and position in literature, there could be no such reserves, and the intercourse must have been as really on terms of familiarity as it appeared to be.