hich the love of the beautiful has been suffered to
depart, these hideous and ugly traits of character make haste to enter,
and occupy the vacant space. What Shakspere says of a single art, music,
is true of art and beauty in general:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils:
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.

THE VICE OF EXCESS.

+The hollowness of ostentation.+--Man is never proud of what he really
enjoys; never vain of what he truly loves; never anxious to show off the
tastes and interests that are essentially his own. In order to take this
false attitude toward an object, it is necessary to hold it apart from
ourselves: a thing which the true lover can never do. He who loves
beautiful things will indeed wish others to share his joy in them. But
this sharing of our joy in beautiful objects, is a very different thing
from showing off our fine things, simply to let other people know that
we have them. Ostentation is the vice of ignorant wealth and vulgar
luxury. It estimates objects by their expensiveness rather than by their
beauty; it aims to awaken in ourselves pride rather than pleasure; and
to arouse in others astonishment rather than admiration.

THE PENALTY.

+Vulgarity akin to laziness.+--Art, and the beauty which it creates,
costs painstaking labor to produce. And to enjoy it when it is produced,
requires at first thoughtful and discriminating attention. The formation
of a correct taste is a growth, not a gift. Hence the dull, the lazy,
and the indifferent never acquire this cultivated taste for the
beautiful in art. This lack of perception, this incapacity for enjoyment
of the beautiful, is vulgarity. Vulgarity is contentment with what is
common, and to be had on easy terms. The root of it is laziness. The
mark of it is stupidity.

At great pains the race has worked out beautiful forms of speech, for
communicating our ideas to each other. Vulgarity in speech is too lazy
to observe these precise and beautiful forms of expression; it clips its
words; throws its sentences together without regard to grammar; falls
into slang; draws its figures from the coarse and low and sensual side
of life, instead of from its pure and noble aspects.

Vulgarity with reference to dress, dwellings, pictures, reading, is of
th