Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In ancient Rome we have patricians , knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

In the circus of to-day the melancholy ghost of the court fool effects the dejection of humbler audiences with the same jests wherewith in life he gloomed the marble hall, panged the patrician sense of humor and tapped the tank of royal tears.

During my first year in Venice I met an ingenious priest, who had been a tutor in a patrician family, and who was willing to lead my faltering steps through the "Inferno." This part of the "Divine Comedy" I read with a beginner's carefulness, and with a rapture in its beauties, which I will whisper the reader do not appear in every line.

We have driven in the Prado--that superb avenue bordered with patrician mansions and noble shade trees--and have visited the chateau Boarely and its curious museum.

Tarzan's mouth watered and a low growl escaped his patrician lips.

It is well known that in the Roman republic the legislative authority, in the last resort, resided for ages in two different political bodies not as branches of the same legislature, but as distinct and independent legislatures, in each of which an opposite interest prevailed: in one the patrician ; in the other, the plebian.

"Oh, Crimsworth is better filled up than I am, I know besides he has a straight nose, arched eyebrows, and all that; but these advantages--if they are advantages--he did not inherit from his mother, the patrician , but from his father, old Crimsworth, who, MY father says, was as veritable a shire blue-dyer as ever put indigo in a vat yet withal the handsomest man in the three Ridings. Hunsden, that patrician descent may be read in a distinctive cast of form and features?"

A great silence fell on the group of patricians , and the commercial party, surprised, were equally silent, trying to discover the subject of this earnest conference. She was like a queen in the midst of her court; she paid no attention to the profound silence that reigned among the patricians , and passed before their camp without pronouncing a single word.