d which he thinks _the go_ everywhere. In a word, this character
is not the offspring of untutored nature but of bad habits; it is made
up of ignorance and conceit. It has a mixture of _slang_ in it. All
slang phrases are for the same reason vulgar; but there is nothing
vulgar in the common English idiom. Simplicity is not vulgarity; but the
looking to affectation of any sort for distinction is. A cockney is a
vulgar character, whose imagination cannot wander beyond the suburbs
of the metropolis; so is a fellow who is always thinking of the High
Street, Edinburgh. We want a name for this last character. An opinion is
vulgar that is stewed in the rank breath of the rabble; nor is it a bit
purer or more refined for having passed through the well-cleansed teeth
of a whole court. The inherent vulgarity is in having no other feeling
on any subject than the crude, blind, headling, gregarious notion
acquired by sympathy with the mixed multitude or with a fastidious
minority, who are just as insensible to the real truth, and as
indifferent to everything but their own frivolous and vexatious
pretensions. The upper are not wiser than the lower orders because they
resolve to differ from them. The fashionable have the advantage of
the unfashionable in nothing but the fashion. The true vulgar are the
_servum pecus imitatorum_--the herd of pretenders to what they do not
feel and to what is not natural to them, whether in high or low life.
To belong to any class, to move in any rank or sphere of life, is not a
very exclusive distinction or test of refinement. Refinement will in all
classes be the exception, not the rule; and the exception may fall out
in one class as well as another. A king is but an hereditary title. A
nobleman is only one of the House of Peers. To be a knight or alderman
is confessedly a vulgar thing. The king the other day made Sir Walter
Scott a baronet, but not all the power of the Three Estates could make
another Author of _Waverley_. Princes, heroes, are often commonplace
people: Hamlet was not a vulgar character, neither was Don Quixote. To
be an author, to be a painter, is nothing. It is a trick, it is a trade.

An author! 'tis a venerable name:
How few deserve it, yet what numbers claim!

Nay, to be a Member of the Royal Academy or a Fellow of the Royal
Society is but a vulgar distinction; but to be a Virgil, a Milton, a
Raphael, a Claude, is what fell to the lot of humanity but once! I do
not think they