_Genteel_ is the vulgarest and most plebeian of all known words. Accordingly (and strange it is that the educated users of this word should not perceive that fact), aristocratic people--people in the most undoubted _elite_ of society as to rank or connections--utterly ignore the word. They are aware of its existence in English dictionaries; they know that it slumbers in those vast repositories; they even apprehend your meaning in a vague way when you employ it as an epithet for assigning the pretensions of an individual or a family. Generally it is understood to imply that the party so described is in a position to make morning calls, to leave cards, to be presentable for anything to the contrary apparent in manners, style of conversation, etc. But these and other suggestions still leave a vast area unmapped of blank charts in which the soundings are still doubtful. The word 'genteel' is so eminently vulgar apparently for this reason, that it presents a non-vulgar distinction under a gross and vulgar conception of that distinction. The true and central notion, on which the word revolves, is elevating; but, by a false abstraction of its elements, it is degraded. And yet in parts of this island where the progress of refinement is torpid, and the field of vision is both narrow and unchanging in all that regards the _nuances_ of manners, I have remarked that the word 'genteel' maintains its old advantageous acceptation; and as a proof of this, eminent and even revolutionary thinkers born and bred in such provincial twilight, use the word as if untainted and hardly aware that it is flyblown. Among ourselves it is certain that a peculiar style of gossip, of babble, and of miniature intriguing, invests the atmosphere of little 'townishness,' such as often entangles the more thoughtful and dignified of the residents in troublesome efforts at passive resistance or active counter-action. In dealing with this matter, Mr. Wordsworth instanced Northampton and Nottingham; but a broader difference could hardly be than between these towns. And just as 'genteel' remains the vulgarest of all words, so the words 'simple' and 'simplicity,' amongst all known words, offer the most complex and least simple of ideas. Having made this deprecation on behalf of my own criminality in using such a word as 'genteel,' I go on to say that whilst Northampton was (and _is_, I believe) of all towns the most genteel, Nottingham for more than two centuries has been the most insurrectionary and in a scarlet excess democratic. Nottingham, in fact, has always resembled the Alexandria of ancient days; whilst Northampton could not be other than aristocratic as the centre of a county more thickly gemmed by the ancestral seats of our nobility than any beside in the island. Norwich, again, though a seat of manufacturing industry, has always been modified considerably by a literary body of residents.