It is difficult to see what advantage there can be in genteel ignorance to compensate for its evident disadvantages. Not to be acquainted with unfashionable opinions, not to be able to imagine unfashionable necessities, not to be able to perceive the real likeness between fashionable and unfashionable modes of life on account of some external and superficial difference, is like living in a house with closed shutters. Surely a man, or a woman either, might have as good manners, and be as highly civilized in all respects, with accurate notions of things as with a head full of illusions. To understand the world as it really is, to see the direction in which humanity is travelling, ought to be the purpose of every strong and healthy intellect, even though such knowledge may take it out of gentility altogether. The effect of genteel ignorance on human intercourse is such a deduction from the interest of it that men of ability often avoid genteel society altogether, and either devote themselves to solitary labors, cheered principally by the companionship of books, or else keep to intimate friends of their own order. In Continental countries the public drinking-places are often frequented by men of culture, not because they want to drink, but because they can talk freely about what they think and what they know without being paralyzed by the determined ignorance of the genteel. In England, no doubt, there is more information; and yet Stuart Mill said that "general society as now carried on in England is so insipid an affair, even to the persons who make it what it is, that it is kept up for any reason rather than the pleasure it affords. All serious discussion on matters in which opinions differ being considered ill-bred, and the national deficiency in liveliness and sociability having prevented the cultivation of the art of talking agreeably on trifles, the sole attraction of what is called society to those who are not at the top of the tree is the hope of being aided to climb a little higher. To a person of any but a very common order in thought or feeling, such society, unless he has personal objects to serve by it, must be supremely unattractive; and most people in the present day of any really high class of intellect make their contact with it so slight and at such long intervals as to be almost considered as retiring from it altogether." The loss here is distinctly to the genteel persons themselves. They may not feel it, they may be completely insensible of it, but by making society insipid they eliminate from it the very men who might have been its most valuable elements, and who, whether working in solitude or living with a few congenial spirits, are really the salt of the earth. ESSAY XIX. PATRIOTIC IGNORANCE.