sses current in
another, he 'swallows total grist unsifted, husks and all.' This is not
taste, but folly. At this rate, the hackney-coachman who drives him, or
his horse Contributor whom he has introduced as a select personage to
the vulgar reader, knows as much of the matter as he does.--In a word,
the answer to all this in the first instance is to say what vulgarity
is. Now its essence, I imagine, consists in taking manners, actions,
words, opinions on trust from others, without examining one's own
feelings or weighing the merits of the case. It is coarseness or
shallowness of taste arising from want of individual refinement,
together with the confidence and presumption inspired by example and
numbers. It may be defined to be a prostitution of the mind or body to
ape the more or less obvious defects of others, because by so doing
we shall secure the suffrages of those we associate with. To affect
a gesture, an opinion, a phrase, because it is the rage with a large
number of persons, or to hold it in abhorrence because another set
of persons very little, if at all, better informed cry it down to
distinguish themselves from the former, is in either case equal
vulgarity and absurdity. A thing is not vulgar merely because it is
common. 'Tis common to breathe, to see, to feel, to live. Nothing is
vulgar that is natural, spontaneous, unavoidable. Grossness is not
vulgarity, ignorance is not vulgarity, awkwardness is not vulgarity;
but all these become vulgar when they are affected and shown off on the
authority of others, or to fall in with _the fashion_ or the company we
keep. Caliban is coarse enough, but surely he is not vulgar. We might as
well spurn the clod under our feet and call it vulgar. Cobbett is coarse
enough, but he is not vulgar. He does not belong to the herd. Nothing
real, nothing original, can be vulgar; but I should think an imitator
of Cobbett a vulgar man. Emery's Yorkshireman is vulgar, because he is a
Yorkshireman. It is the cant and gibberish, the cunning and low life
of a particular district; it has 'a stamp exclusive and provincial.' He
might 'gabble most brutishly' and yet not fall under the letter of the
definition; but 'his speech bewrayeth him,' his dialect (like the jargon
of a Bond Street lounger) is the damning circumstance. If he were a mere
blockhead, it would not signify; but he thinks himself a _knowing hand,_
according to the notions and practices of those with whom he was brought
up, an