vulgarity as the dominant feature of the time; and in his list of nuisances and impostors no room is found for the æsthete. At the close of the same year, however, to judge by another set of pessimistic verses, he was still active if not exactly rampant:-- The "culture," too, of the æsthetes, with all its flaccid flams, Its turgid affectations and its silly sickly shams, Is but as dross of Brummagem compared with virgin gold, When matched against the vigorous realities of old. [Sidenote: _The Cult of Intensity_] [Illustration: REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH _Scene--A drawing-room in "Passionate Brompton."_ FAIR ÆSTHETIC (_suddenly, and in deepest tones, to Smith, who has just been introduced to take her in to dinner_): "_Are you intense?_"] The "Dilettante" satirized in a rather ponderous article--one of the series of "Modern Types"--in 1890 represents a later stage of pseudo-culture, in which a contempt for everything characteristically English is the leading trait. He warbles French chansonnettes, defies all the rules of English grammar and metre in his poetry, is much in request at charitable concerts in aristocratic drawing-rooms, affects a mincing delicacy in gait and manner, paints his face in middle age, talks habitually in an artistic jargon, and passes away in an odour of pastilles. The type existed and exists, but hardly deserved such detailed and elaborate portraiture. There is more interest in the verses on the over-cultured undergraduate in 1891--one of a series entitled "Men who have taken me in--to dinner," by a Dinner Belle:-- He stood, as if posed by a column, Awaiting our hostess' advance; Complacently pallid and solemn, He deigned an Olympian glance. Icy cool, in a room like a crater, He silently marched me downstairs, And Mont Blanc could not freeze with a greater Assurance of grandeur and airs. I questioned if Balliol was jolly-- "Your epithet," sighed he, "means noise, Vile noise!" At his age it were folly To revel with Philistine boys. Competition, the century's vulture, Devoured academical fools; For himself, utter pilgrim of Culture, He countenanced none of the schools. Exams. were a Brummagem fashion Of mobs and inferior taste; They withered "Translucence" and "Passion," They vulgarized leisure by haste. Self to realize--that was the question, Inscrutable still while the cooks Of our Colleges preached indigestion, Their Dons indigestible books. Two volumes alone were not bathos, The one by an early Chinese, The other, of infinite pathos, Our Nursery Rhymes, if you please. He was lost, he avowed, in this era; His spirit was seared by the West, But he deemed to be Monk in Madeira Would probably suit him the best. [Sidenote: _Preciosity and Self-Expression_] [Illustration: BRITISH PROPRIETY