“‘I must forget myself. I’m under some doom. I see it now. Nobody cares for me. I don’t know what happiness is. I was born under a bad star. My fate’s written.’ Following his youthful wisdom, this wounded hart dragged his slow limbs toward the halls of brandy and song. “One learns to have compassion for fools, by studying them: and the fool, though Nature is wise, is next door to Nature. He is naked in his simplicity; he can tell us much, and suggest more. My excuse for dwelling upon him is, that he holds the link of my story. Where fools are numerous, one of them must be prominent now and then in a veracious narration.” According to the old duality of satirized objects,--Vice and Folly, identified with the deceiver and the deceived,--the two classes just discussed would exhaust the list. But these signify folly in its narrowest and most literal sense, a plain lack of brains and a general incapacity. In its wider sense it includes misuse as well as want of intelligence. These mortals, as Puck discovered, are indeed all fools, at times and on certain points. The number may not be infinite, but Lydgate discovered sixty-three kinds; and Barclay augmented the list to nearly one hundred. Perfect wisdom would cast out not only ignorance, but also frivolity, sentimentality, vanity, all sorts of false standards and all manner of fallacies. Therefore snobs, romanticists, egoists, fanatics, merely exemplify folly in its varieties and ramifications. The snob is defined by his great expositor as “one who meanly admires mean things.” A modern scholar calls vulgarity “satisfaction with anything inferior when a superior is attainable.”[375] These definitions together indicate why snobbishness and vulgarity are allied, though not identical. There is, however, this difference, that satisfaction implies in itself a passive acquiescence, whereas admiration leads naturally to imitation, and if possible, appropriation, of the thing approved. Of course, satisfaction on a different plane results from a feeling of attainment and possession; but it then becomes pride or vanity, which in turn may or may not be of the snobbish sort. In popular apprehension, indeed, snobbishness and vulgarity are rated as more opposite than allied. The snob is thought of as either belonging to the polite world or trying to secure an entrance to its polished circles. If he occupies the former position, he boasts of his refinement, and from his eminence contemplates with scorn or at best an affable condescension, the mob below. To this class belong such members as Lytton’s and Disraeli’s aristocrats; such diverse types in Dickens as Sir John Chester, the Monseigneur in _Tale of Two Cities_, Mrs. General, and Mrs. Gowan; Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne, Major Pendennis, and the Misses Pinkerton; Trollope’s de Courcys and the Chaldicote circle; Meredith’s Everard Romfrey and Ferdinand Laxley.