compared with which those employed to make
fortunes by the getters up of the South Sea Bubble might be called honest
dealing, are decidedly not gentlefolks. Now as it is clearly
demonstrable that a person may be perfectly genteel according to some
standard or other, and yet be no gentleman, so is it 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 eighteen-pence 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? Has he not generosity and courage? Whilst a hack author, does
he pawn the books entrusted to him to review? Does he break his word to
his publisher? Does he write begging letters? Does he get clothes or
lodgings without paying for them? Again, whilst a wanderer, does he
insult helpless women on the road with loose proposals or ribald
discourse? Does he take what is not his own from the hedges? Does he
play on the fiddle, or make faces in public-houses, in order to obtain
pence or beer? or does he call for liquor, swallow it, and then say to a
widowed landlady, "Mistress, I have no brass"? In a word, what vice and
crime does he perpetrate--what low acts does he commit? Therefore, with
his endowments, who will venture to say that he is no gentleman?--unless
it be an admirer of Mr. Flamson--a clown--who will, perhaps, shout--"I
say he is no gentleman; for who can be a gentleman who keeps no gig?"

The indifference exhibited by Lavengro for what is merely genteel,
compared with his solicitude never to infringe the strict laws of honour,
should read a salutary lesson. The generality of his countrymen are far
more careful not to transgress the customs of what they call gentility,
than to violate the laws of honour or morality. They will shrink from
carrying their own carpet-bag, and from speaking to a person in se