ow venture to express: with all deference, let me add, to
Coleridge's ethereal genius and magical mastery of words.

"Intense study of the Bible," he says, "will keep any writer from being
_vulgar_, in point of style." Granted; and the sacred scriptures of any
people and any creed would have the some influence. Vulgarity, unless
it is bestial, is monkeyish. Obviously this is a characteristic alien to
religion, which is based on the sense of wonder, and deals chiefly with
the sublime. While the mind is absorbed by the unseen, imagination is
called into play; and imagination is the antithesis of vulgarity. The
unknown is also the terrible, and when the mind is alarmed there is no
room for the _puerilities_ of egotism. Any exaltation of feeling serves
the same purpose. The most vulgar woman, in terror at a danger to her
child, is lifted into the sphere of tragedy, and becomes a subject for
art; nor could the lowest wretch exhibit vulgarity when committing
a murder under the influence of passion. Vulgarity, in short, is
self-consciousness, or at least only compatible with it; and displays
itself in self-assertion at the expense of others, or in disregard or
in defiance of their feelings. Now Monotheism, such as the Bible in its
sublimest parts is pregnant with, naturally banishes this disposition,
just in proportion as it is real. It may tolerate, and even cherish,
many other evils, but not that; for vulgarity, as I understand it,
is absolutely inconsistent with awe. How then do I account for the
vulgarities of the Salvation Army? Simply by the fact that these
people have _no_ awe; they show the absurdities of religion without its
sentiments. They are _townspeople_, used to music-halls, public-houses,
street-fights, and frivolous crowds. Their antics would be impish to
religionists whose awe was nurtured by hills and forests, the rising and
setting sun, and the majesty of night.

Not only do we find the same austere simplicity in the Vedas, the
Kuran, and other sacred scriptures; we find it in most of the old
world literature. The characteristic of modern writings is subtlety and
dexterity; that of the ancient, massiveness and directness; and the
same difference holds good in a comparison of the various stages of our
literature. The simplicity of the Elizabethan lyrics, to say nothing
of Chaucer, is only to be emulated in later ages, whose life is so
much more complex, by a recluse visionary like Blake. Even when Shelley
a