I will conclude this chapter with a quotation from M. Taine, who estimates our insular propriety very shrewdly in his entertaining "Notes on England." "I am acquainted with a London merchant who visits Paris twice yearly on business. When he is there he is very jovial, and amuses himself on Sunday as freely as anyone else. His Paris host, who visited him at his home in London, where he was made thoroughly welcome, going downstairs on Sunday to the room where there was a miniature billiard table, pushed the balls about on it. The merchant in alarm begged him to stop at once, saying, 'The neighbours will be scandalised should they hear this.'" CHAPTER VI. CULTURED GENTILITY. "I hardly know an _intellectual_ man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavour to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock--that is some particular, not universal way of viewing things." THOREAU. "Do you persuade yourself that I respect you?" "MEASURE FOR MEASURE." Cultured gentility is one of the signs of the times. Snobbishness is a deep-seated vice of human beings, and a trait of the gregarious mammalia, with which the human snob, when he is more than ordinarily ignorant, disclaims relationship. When Darwin told people that their early progenitors were hairy and ape-like, with prehensile feet, great canine teeth, and tails equipped with the proper muscles, all the Respectables jeered at him, and said that they were "only a little lower than the angels," and that monkeys must have been fashioned as travesties of men. But though we have moved upwards, "working out of the beast," Man still exhibits race prejudice, patriotic bias, and the low instinct of class exclusiveness. Perhaps at no period of our social evolution have we been more cultured, and yet more vulgar, than at the present time. Such a juxtaposition may appear to indicate that a little knowledge for the masses is not without its disadvantages as well as its blessing. The proletarian of the sixteenth century could not read nor write; but he was probably less vulgar than those among his descendants whose acquaintance with modern literature is restricted to the gutter library of cuts and snips and racing tips. Simple, merry Dick trolled "Old Rose"; flash 'Arry and his blatant mates hiccough the staccato of "Glorious Beer."