borers are even less liable to exhibit vulgarity than other classes, who, from their better worldly position are tempted to affect to be still higher than they are. The hard-working masses are too much straitened for affectation. Humbleness of station is, in choice natures, compensated by an elevating humility. Nature, moreover, has no more respect for our emblazoned dignities than a conflagration has for the title-deeds of a Barony. Out of a room full of Dukes and Earls, Charles Lamb would have been picked as the man of the whole company whose physiognomy, carriage, and speech most strongly illustrated the opposite of vulgarity. The intellectual sparkle of his countenance, clarified, transfigured, by a light ever flaming outward from the beautiful, was tempered by an expression drawn from moral depths, that told of tragic trials heroically withstood. The vulgar man's face is no tablet for recording aspirations and trials. His desires are gross, his ambitions worldly, his disappointments earthy.

Vulgarity implies shallowness of nature and therewith crudeness of performance, its chief domain being the more exposed phenomena of social life, which afford a field for the display of minor vanities and pretensions and impudences. The vulgar man is not civil, he is officious, and, from doltish indelicacy, is prone to meddling, and thus becomes at times offensive as well as ridiculous. Moderation, modesty, unobtrusiveness being characteristics of gentlemanhood, vulgarity shows itself in the contraries of over-doing and excess.

Over-dressing is vulgar, especially in women, for the glare of the sun-lit and eye-lit street. Toilets, even when tasteful as to color and style, denote, if habitually rich and showy, mental vulgarity, their transparent design being by superficial material means to impress the beholder. The refined beholder is unfavorably impressed, suspecting such outward richness (except on grand gala-days) to be the mask of inward poverty; and regarding simplicity of dress in the wealthy as a promise of wealth in resources of heart and head. In individual instances he may err on either side, but a prevalent fashion of costly dressing is a sign of general vulgarity. The finest type of ladyhood would recoil offended from her mirror at seeing herself besilked and befeathered and bejewelled for a morning walk or drive. She will be as simply elegant in her attire, in doors or out, as in her manners; will not exhibit, either in the one or the other, the slightest effort to outvie her neighbors; will show her mind, and will charm, by the tasteful selection and combination of refined materials, and weakens not her native dignity and personal attractiveness, by the costliness or showiness of her raiment. In her apparel will be expressed the modesty and chasteness of her nature, and she will blush to be obliged, (which no lady should allow herself to be,) to conform to the fashion of very "low dressing," - an exposure, the immodest purport of which "jumps into the eyes" of the spectator at a Paris Bal Mabile.

Natures there are so gross and egotistic and unspiritual, that even a sense of beauty (shown, however, in the material and fugitive) cannot save them from vulgarity; as if to

bear witness

and the more emphatically because exceptionally - that the foundations of all best manhood rest on the moral.

A large proportion of vulgarity is negative; that is, in the demeanor there is no ambitious effort, which makes conspicuous the æsthetic obtuseness, but this obtuseness and want of social culture become transparent through juxtaposition with refinement. The individuals do not actively, eagerly affect to be what they are not; but yet, being where, from obvious deficiency, they are out of place, there is, by their mere presence, a seeming to be what they are not, and thus is fulfilled the chief condition of vulgarity. Some people may be said to be modestly vulgar.

In language vulgarity shows itself, not so much in the use of coarse or inappropriate words or of low or uneducated phrases, as of such as denote a falling from the refined standard through æsthetic incapacity. Vocally to add an h to monosyllables or polysyllables beginning with a vowel, or to interchange w and v, is a grievous lapse from the elocution of the English tongue, betokening lack of sensibility to the beauty and proprieties of speech. Persons guilty of these oral crimes are unconscious of having committed any breach of law; but this unconsciousness, evincing æsthetic hebetude, is the essence of the vulgarity. These and similar vices in phrase or elocution are endurable in Fleet Street or Smithfield Market, where the mind's verbal utterances are curtailed and despoiled by the gross simplicity of its needs and the maiming routine of its work; but when in a drawing-room of Mayfair or Belgravia they assail the ears of a scholarly gentleman, he experiences a distressful shock, and his first motion is to treat the culprit as the "conductor" treats a passenger without a ticket. Luminous atmosphere brings out vulgarity, as varnish the lights and shadows of a picture.