ennobling it by pureness of moral habit for many generations, and yet may not have got any title, or other sign of nobleness, attached to their names. Nevertheless, the probability is always in favour of the race which has had acknowledged supremacy, and in which every motive leads to the endeavour to preserve its true nobility.

Modern Painters,

vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vii. § 3 n.

*      *      *      *      *

The old English rough proverb is irrevocably true,—you can make no silk purse of a sow's ear. And this great truth also holds—though it is a disagreeable one to look full in the face—that, named or nameless, no man can make himself a gentleman who was not born one. If he lives a right life, and cultivates all the powers, and yet more all the sensibilities, he is born with, and chooses his wife well, his own son will be more a gentleman than he is, and he may see yet better blood than his son's in his grandchild's cheeks, but he must be content to remain a clown himself—if he was born a clown.

Modern Painters,

vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vii. § 3 n.

*      *      *      *      *

The two great words which, in their first use, meant only perfection of race, have come, by consequence of the invariable connection of virtue with the fine human nature, both to signify benevolence of disposition. The word "generous" and the word "gentle" both, in their origin, meant only "of pure race," but because charity and tenderness are inseparable from this purity of blood, the words which once stood only for pride, now stand as synonymous for virtue.

The Crown of Wild Olive, § 108.

*      *      *      *      *

What vulgarity is, whether in manners, acts, or conceptions, most well-educated persons understand; but what it consists in, or arises from, is a more difficult question. I believe that on strict analysis it will be found definable as "the habit of mind and act resulting from the prolonged combination of insensibility with insincerity."

It would be more accurate to say, "constitutional insensibility"; for people are born vulgar, or not vulgar, irrevocably. An apparent insensibility may often be caused by one strong feeling quenching or conquering another; and this to the extent of involving the person in all kinds of cruelty and crime: yet, Borgia or Ezzelin, lady and knight still; while the born clown is dead in all sensation and capacity of thought, whatever his acts or life may be.

Cloten, in Cymbeline, is the most perfect study of pure vulgarity, which I know in literature; Perdita, in Winter's Tale, the most perfect study of its opposite (irrespective of such higher virtue or intellect as we have in Desdemona or Portia). Perdita's exquisite openness, joined with as exquisite sensitiveness, constitute the precise opposite of the apathetic insincerity which is, I believe, the essence of vulgarity.

Academy Notes, 1859.

*      *      *      *      *

Gentlemanliness in a limited sense [may mean] only the effect of careful education, good society, and refined habits of life, on average temper and character. Deep and true gentlemanliness [is] based on intense sensibility and sincerity, perfected by courage and other qualities of race, [as opposed to] that union of insensibility with cunning, which is the essence of vulgarity.

Sir Joshua and Holbein, § 6 n.

*      *      *      *      *

There is, indeed, perhaps, no greater sign of innate and real vulgarity of mind or defective education than the want of power to understand the universality of the ideal truth; the absence of sympathy with the colossal grasp of those intellects, which have in them so much of divine, that nothing is small to them, nothing large; but with equal and unoffended vision they take in the sum of the world,—Straw Street[#] and the seventh heaven,—in the same instant.

[#] Dante, Paradiso, x. 133-34.

A certain portion of this divine spirit is visible even in the lower examples of all the true men; it is, indeed, perhaps, the clearest test of their belonging to the true and great group, that they are continually touching what to the multitude appear vulgarities. The higher a man stands, the more the word "vulgar" becomes unintelligible to him. Vulgar? what, that poor farmer's girl of William Hunt's, bred in the stable, putting on her Sunday gown, and pinning her best cap, out of the green and red pin-cushion! Not so; she may be straight on the road to those high heavens, and may shine hereafter as one of the stars in the firmament for ever. Nay, even that lady in the satin bodice, with her arm laid over a balustrade to show it, and her eyes turned up to heaven to show them; and the sportsman waving his rifle for the terror of beasts, and displaying his perfect dress for the delight of men, are kept, by the very misery and vanity of them, in the thoughts of a great painter, at a sorrowful level, somewhat above vulgarity. It is only when the minor painter takes them on his easel, that they become things for the universe to be ashamed of.

We may dismiss this matter of vulgarity in plain and few words, at least as far as regards art. There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

Modern Painters,

vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. vii. § 9.

*      *      *      *      *

The first thing then that he has to do, if unhappily his parents or masters have