d the ne plus ultra of gentility; by another class pride, stateliness, and title; by another, wealth and flaming tawdriness. But what constitutes a gentl

be perfectly genteel according to some standard or other, and yet be no gentleman, so it is demonstrable that a person may have no pretensions to gentility, and yet be a gentleman. For example, there is Lavengro! Would the admirers of the emperor, or the admirers of those who admire the emperor, or the admirers of Mr. Flamson, call him genteel? and gentility with them is everything! Assuredly they would not; and assuredly they would consider him respectively as a being to be shunned, despised, or hooted. Genteel! Why at one time he is a hack author-writes reviewals for eighteenpence a page-edits a Newgate chronicle. At another he wanders the country with a face grimy from occasionally mending kettles; and there is no evidence that his clothes are not seedy and torn, and his shoes down at the heel; but by what process of reasoning will they prove that he is no gentleman? Is he not learned

ligacy; is not ashamed to speak to a beggar in rags, and will associate with anybody, provided he can gratify a laudable curiosity. He has no abstract love for what is low, or what the world calls low. He sees that many things which the world looks down upon are valuable, so he prizes much which the world condemns; he sees that many things which the world admires are contemptible, so he despises much which the world does not; but when the world prizes what is really excellent, he does not contemn it, because the world regards it. If he learns Irish, which all the world scoffs at, he likewise learns Italian, which all the world melts at. If he learns Gypsy

divergency; he shrinks from many things at which gentility placidly hums a tune, or approvingly simpers, and does some things at which gentility positively shrinks. He will not run into debt for clothes or lodgings, which he might do without any scandal to gentility; he will not receive money from Francis Ardry, and go to Brighton with the sister of Annette Le Noir, though there is nothing ungenteel in borrowing money from a friend, even when you never intend to repay him, and something poignantly genteel in going to a watering-place with a gay young Frenchwoman; but he has no objection, after raising twenty pounds by the sale of that extraordinary work "Joseph Sell," to set off into the country, mend kettles under hedge-rows, and make pony and donkey shoes in a dingle. Here, perhaps, some plain, well-meaning person will cry-and with much apparent justice-how can the writer justify him in this act? What motive, save a love for what is low, could induce him to do such a thing? Would the writer have everybody who is in need of recreation go into the country, mend kettles under hedges, and make pony shoes in dingles? To such an observation the writer would answer, that Lavengro had an excellent motive in doing what he did, but that the writer is not so unreasonable as to wish everybody to do the same. It is not everybody who can mend kettles. It is not everybody who is in similar circumstances to those in which Lavengro was. Lavengro flies from London and hack authorship, and takes to the roads from fear of consumption; it is expensive to put up at inns, and even at public-houses, and Lavengro has not much money; so he buys a tinker's cart and apparatus, and sets up as tinker, and subsequently as blacksmith; a person living in a tent, or in anything else, must do something or go mad; Lavengro had a mind, as he himself well knew, with some slight tendency to madness, and had he not employed himself, he must have gone wild; so to employ himself he drew up

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refused a commission in the service of that illustrious monarch George the Fourth, provided he had thought that he could live on his pay, and not be forced to run in debt to tradesmen, without any hope of paying them, for clothes and luxuries, as many highly genteel officers in that honourable service were in the habit of doing. For the sake of tinkering, he would certainly not have refused a secretaryship of an embassy to Persia, in which he might have turned his acquaintance with Persian, Arabic, and the Lord only knows what other languages, to account. He took to tinkering and smithery, because no better employments were at his command. No war is waged in the book against rank, wealth, fine clothes, or dignified employments; it is sho

rciliousness, and selfishness of a certain aristocracy make it all the more regarded by its worshippers? and do not the clownish and gutter-blood admirers of Mr. Flamson like him all the more because they are conscious that he is a knave? If such is the case -and, alas! is it not the case?-they cannot be too frequently told that fine clothes, wealth, and titles adorn a person in proportion as he adorns them; that if worn by t

ch genius, the postillion, and his employer. Again, when the life of the hero is given to the world, amidst the howl about its lowness and vulgarity, raised by the servile crew whom its independence of sentiment has stung, more than one powerful voice has been heard testifying approbation of its learning and the purity of its

what a simple person that elderly gentleman was, who, abruptly starting, asked in rather an authoritative voice, "and why should Lieutenant P--- be shunned by respectable society?" and who, after entering into what was said to be a masterly analysis of the entire

amous case? they are but too well known, and if ever cruelty, pride, and cowardice, and things much worse than even cruelty, cowardice, and pride were brought to light, and, at the same time, countenanced, they were in that case. What availed the triumphant justification of the poor victim? There was at first a roar of indignation against his oppressors, but how long did it last? He had been turned out of the service, they remained in it with their red coats and epaulets; he was merely the son of a man who had rendered good service to his country, they were, for the most part, highly connected-they were in the extremest degree genteel, he quite the reverse; so the nation wavered, considered, thought the genteel side was the safest aft

ts, they have been obliged to have recourse to extreme severity in order to protect themselves from the insolence and mutinous spirit of the men,-"He is no better than ourselves: shoot him, bayonet him, or fling him overboard!" they say of some obnoxious individual raised above them by his merit. Soldiers and sailors, in general, will bear any amount of tyranny from a lordly sot, or the son of a man who has "plenty of brass"-their own term-but will mutiny against the just orders of a skilful and brave officer who "is no better than themselves." There was the affair of the "Bounty," for example: Bligh was one of the best seamen that ever trod deck, and one of the bravest of men; proofs of his seamanship he gave by steering, amidst dreadful weather, a deeply-laden boat for nearly four thousand miles over an almost unknown ocean-of his bravery, at the fight of Copenhagen, one of the most desperate ever fought, of which after Nelson he was the hero: he was, moreover, not an unkind man; but the crew of the "Bounty" mutinied against him, and set him half naked in an open boat, with certain of his men who remained faithful to him, and ran away with the ship. Their principal motive for doing so was an idea, whether true or groundless the writer cannot say, that Bligh was "no better than themselves;" he was certainly neither a lord's illegitimate, nor possessed of twenty thousand pounds. The writer knows what he is writing about, having been acquainted in his early years with an individual who was turned adrift with Bligh, and who died about the year '22, a lieutenan

does not come forward, the dishonourable offer of a cornet of a regiment of crack hussars. It makes poor Jews, male and female, forsake the synagogue for the sixpenny theatre or penny hop; the Jew to take up with an Irish female of loose character, and the Jewess with a musician of the Guards, or the Tipperary servant of Captain Mulligan. With respect to the gypsies, it is making the women what they never were before-harlots; and the men what they never were before-careless fathers and husbands. It has made the daughter of Ursula the chaste take up with the base drummer of a wild-beast show. It makes Gorgiko Brown, the gypsy man, leave his tent and his old wife, of an evening, and thrust himself into society which could well dispense with him. "Brother," said Mr. Petulengro to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, "there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a tea-kettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls for rum and wate

e, and consequently by no means genteel; they'll quit it for ours, which is the perfection of what they admire; with which Templars, Hospitalers, mitred abbots, Gothic abbeys, long-drawn aisles, golden censers, incense, et cetera, are connected; nothing, or next to nothing, of Christ, it is true, but weighed in the balance against gentility, where will Christianity be? why, kicking against the beam-ho! ho!" And in connection with the gentility-nonsense, he expa