“The grand distinction of the under forms of the new school of poets is their vulgarity.  By this I do not mean that they are coarse, but ‘shabby-genteel,’ as it is termed.  A man may be coarse and yet not vulgar, and the reverse.  Burns is often coarse, but never vulgar.  Chatterton is never vulgar, nor Wordsworth, nor the higher of the Lake school, though they treat of low life in all its branches.  It is in their finery that the new under school are most vulgar, and they may be known by this at once; as what we called at Harrow ‘a Sunday blood’ might be easily distinguished from a gentleman, although his clothes might be better cut, and his boots the best blackened, of the two;—­probably because he made the one or cleaned the other with his own hands.

“In the present case, I speak of writing, not of persons.  Of the latter, I know nothing; of the former, I judge as it is found. * * They may be honourable and gentlemanly men, for what I know, but the latter quality is studiously excluded from their publications.  They remind me of Mr. Smith and the Miss Broughtons at the Hampstead Assembly, in ‘Evelina.’  In these things (in private life, at least) I pretend to some small experience:  because, in the course of my youth, I have seen a little of all sorts of society, from the Christian prince and the Mussulman sultan and pacha, and the higher ranks of their countries, down to the London boxer, the ‘flash and the swell,’ the Spanish muleteer, the wandering Turkish dervise, the Scotch Highlander, and the Albanian robber;—­to say nothing of the curious varieties of Italian social life.  Far be it from me to presume that there are now, or can be, such a thing as an aristocracy of poets; but there is a nobility of thought and of style, open to all stations, and derived partly from talent, and partly from education,—­which is to be found in Shakspeare, and Pope, and Burns, no less than in Dante and Alfieri, but which is nowhere to be perceived in the mock birds and bards of Mr. Hunt’s little chorus.  If I were asked to define what this gentlemanliness is, I should say that it is only to be defined by examples—­of those who have it, and those who have it not.  In life, I should say that most military men have it, and few naval; that several men of rank have it, and few lawyers; that it is more frequent among authors than divines (when they are not pedants); that fencing-masters have more of it than dancing-masters, and singers than players; and that (if it be not an Irishism to say so) it is far more generally diffused among women than among men.  In poetry, as well as writing in general, it will never make entirely a poet or a poem; but neither poet nor poem will ever be good for any thing without it.  It is the salt of society, and the seasoning of composition. Vulgarity is far worse than downright black-guardism;