Contemporaneous with a widespread vulgarity of thought and a hideous banality of living, there is an immense development of culture. Nowadays it is the fashion to "go in" for "culture," and in society you must know, or affect to know, something about evolution, the higher criticism, Ibsen, Whistler's pictures, and Chippendale furniture. You may learn much about these, and be "smart" at the same time; for smartness and culture go hand-in-hand to the "crushes" and "at homes," and are as brother and sister one to the other. To use a phrase from the vocabulary of culture-cum-smartness, you are "not in the running" if you have merely mastered the theory of the universal germ, and neglected to practise the skirt dance or the plantation song. Once upon a time, the philosopher and the man of letters came out and was separate from amongst the crowd. He lived mostly in the seclusion of his library, which was neither good for his understanding nor his digestion. But he forewent the pomps of smart society, partly because smart society did not wish to be bored, and partly owing to his enlightened instinct of Bohemianism, which found wholesome gratification in the unostentatious amenities of the literary symposium, the forgathering with one or two of his craft at the historic "Cheshire Cheese" or the "Cock Tavern." He dressed himself with a certain careless distinction; he drank cider with Porson, and spent ambrosial nights in the fumes from churchwardens with genial Lamb, Hazlitt, Godwin, Leigh Hunt, and Landor. These were men of culture who refused to hover on the fringe of a shallow, fashionable society, not because they were intellectual snobs, but because their pursuits were on a higher plane than the frivolities of Respectability. Wordsworth dwelt remote among the hills; De Quincey led laborious days in the solitude of Mavis Bush; Shelley lived unknown of his neighbours at Marlow; and Landor, "a noble-looking old man, badly dressed in shabby snuff-clothes, a dirty old blue necktie and unstarched cotton shirt," lived chiefly aloof in Florence. None of these qualified themselves for lionisation in society. The arts of gentility are not compatible with the study of science and philosophy. Ampère, the scientific investigator, went one day to dine with Madame Beauregard. His hands were stained by a drug which leaves its mark on the skin for several days. Poor Ampère! what did he in a company where externals count for all a man is worth? His hostess could not dine with one whose hands were soiled in the interest of posterity: "I promised not to return there before my hands were white. Of course, I shall never enter the house again," wrote Ampère to his wife. And have we not read how Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds were mistaken by a finical lady for a pair of working men when she saw them conversing together?