“Madam,” replied the old gentleman, “I think it an honor to have your son’s acquaintance; and I wish he would not be quite so diffident of himself. He is in the way to preferment; but he must not forget that though such men as his noble patron may be ready enough to reward merit, they have no time to hunt about for it.”
Mrs. Markham had, as we have observed, a degree of pride, and being the mother of a son who was a young man of rather superior understanding, she supposed that he was far above all the rest of the world, and must make his way by dint of his own natural talents: therefore, as if she imagined that her son required and needed no other patronage than the power of his own mind, she replied,
“I feel very highly gratified, sir, by the kindness which my son has experienced from you, but I wish that his success in the world may be rather owing to his own merit than to patronage.”
“Madam,” replied Mr. Martindale, “your notions are very good for the country; but London is a very large place, and those who have talents must advertise them by some means or other. I am an old man, I have seen something of the world, and I can tell you what I have seen; I have seen talents lost, ruined, buried alive, rendered useless, ay, worse than useless, a very torment to their possessors, because they have had a pragmatical conceit that they must be independent of patronage. Excuse me, my good lady, I am an oddity I know. Now let me ask you one question. If you wished to go to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which way would you go?”
Mrs. Markham smiled at the oddness of the illustration, and replied, “Of course, sir, I should go the usual way up the stairs.”
“To be sure you would,” replied Mr. Martindale; “but if, under the notion of independence, you should attempt to climb up without the usual assistance of common-place steps, you would find yourself miserably disappointed. I tell you what, Mrs. Markham, I hate sycophancy and fawning as much as you can do; and I should be no real friend to your son, did I recommend him to adopt such means of advancing himself in the world. But there is a fault on the other side; there is an affectation of independence. Now this affectation neither the mob nor the aristocracy can endure. As for your son, he can only rise by means of his talents; he has nothing else to go to market with; he has no votes or borough-interest wherewith to bribe ministers, and no pompous foolery of speechification wherewith to purchase the approbation of the mob. I respect him for his plain straightforward good sense, and if my cub of a cousin, who has made his nobility ridiculous by his slip-shod dignity and equivocal respectability, had possessed those qualities which your son possesses, he might be called Right Honorable with a serious countenance.”