ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION.-WILLIAM HAZLITT.

Few subjects are more nearly allied than these two-vulgarity and affectation. It may be said of them truly that "thin partitions do their bounds divide." There cannot be a surer proof of a low origin or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel. We must have a strong tendency to that which we are always trying to avoid; whenever we pretend, on all occasions, a mighty contempt for anything, it is a pretty clear sign that we feel ourselves very nearly on a level with it. Of the two classes of people, I hardly know which is to be regarded with most distaste, the vulgar aping the genteel, or the genteel constantly sneering at, and endeavoring to distinguish themselves from the vulgar. These two sets of persons are always thinking of one another; the lower of the higher with envy, the more fortunate of their less happy neighbors with contempt. They are habitually placed in opposition to each other; jostle in their pretensions at every turn; and the same objects and train of thought (only reserved by the relative situation of either party,) occupy their whole time and attention. The one are straining every nerve and outraging common sense, to be thought genteel; the others have no other object or idea in their heads than not to be thought vulgar. This is but poor spite; a very pitiful style of ambition. To be merely not that which one heartily despises, is a very humble claim to superiority: to despise what one really is, is still worse.

Gentility is only a more select and artificial kind of vulgarity. It cannot exist but by a sort of borrowed distinction. It plumes itself up and revels in the homely pretensions of the mass of mankind. It judges of the worth of every thing by name, fashion, opinion; and hence, from the conscious absence of real qualities, or sincere satisfaction in itself, it builds its supercilious and fantastic conceit on the wretchedness and wants of others. Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity. The difference between the "Great Vulgar and the Small" is mostly in outward circumstances. The coxcomb criticises the dress of the clown, as the pedant cavils at the bad grammar of the illiterate. Those who have the fewest resources in themselves, naturally seek the food of their self-love elsewhere. The most ignorant people find most to

laugh at in strangers: scandal and satire prevail most in country places; and a propensity to ridicule every the slightest or most palpable deviation from what we happen to approve, ceases with the progress of common sense and decency. True worth does not exult in the faults and deficiency of others; as true refinement turns away from grossness and deformity, instead of being tempted to indulge in an unmanly triumph over it. Raphael would not faint away at the daubing of a sign-post, nor Homer hold his head the higher for being in the company of a Grub-street bard. Real power, real excellence does not seek for a foil in imperfection; nor fear contamination from coming in contact with that which is coarse and homely. It reposes on itself, and is equally free from spleen and affectation. But the spirit of gentility is the mere essence of spleen and affectation; -of affected delight in its own would-be qualifications, and of ineffable disdain poured out upon the involuntary blunders or accidental disadvantages of those whom it chooses to treat as its inferiors.

SOUNDS.-ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

I.

Hearken, hearken!

The rapid river carrieth
Many noises underneath

The hoary ocean;
Teaching his solemnity,
Sounds of inland life and glee,
Learnt beside the waving tree,
When the winds in summer prank
Toss the shades from bank to bank,
And the quick rains, in emotion
Which rather glads than grieves,
Count and visibly rehearse
The pulses of the universe
Upon the summer leaves-
Learnt among the lilies straight,
When they bow them to the weight
Of many bees, whose hidden hum
Seemeth from themselves to come-
Learnt among the grasses green,
Where the rustling mice are scen,
By the gleaming, as they run,
Of their quick eyes in the sun;
And lazy sheep are browzing through,
With their noses trailed in dew;

And the squirrel leaps adown,
Holding fast the filbert brown;
And the lark, with more of mirth
In his song that suiteth earth,
Droppeth some in soaring high,
To pour the rest out in the sky:
While the woodland doves, apart
In the copse's leafy heart,
Solitary not ascetic,

Hidden and yet vocal, seem
Joining, in a lovely psalm,

Man's despondence, nature's calm,
Half mystical and half pathetic,
Like a sighing in a dream.

All these sounds the river telleth,
Softened to an undertone

Which ever and anon he swelleth

By a burden of his own,

In the ocean's ear,

Ay! and ocean seems to hear,

With an inward gentle scorn,

Smiling to his caverns worn.

II.

Hearken, hearken!

The child is shouting at his play
Just in the tramping funeral's way;

The widow moans as she turns aside

To shun the face of the blushing bride,

While, shaking the tower of the ancient church,

The marriage bells do swing;

And in the shadow of the porch

An idiot sits, with his lean hands full

Of hedgerow flowers and a poet's skull,
Laughing loud and gibbering,
Because it is so brown a thing,

While he sticketh the gaudy poppies red
In and out the senseless head,

Where all sweet fancies grew instead.
And you may hear, at the self-same time,
Another poet who reads his rhyme,
Low as a brook in the summor air-
Save when he droppeth his voice adown,
To dream of the amaranthine crown

His mortal brows shall wear.

And a baby cries with a feeble sound

'Neath the weary weight of the life new-found; And an old man groans-with his testament Only half signed-for the life that's spent;

And lovers twain do softly say,

As they sit on a grave, "for aye, for aye!" And foeman twain, while Earth, their mother,

Looks greenly upward, curse each other.

A school-boy drones his task, with looks
Cast over the page to the elm-tree rooks:
A lonely student cries aloud,
Eureka! clasping at his shroud;

A beldame's age-cracked voice doth sing
To a little infant slumbering:

A maid forgotten weeps alone,

Muffling her sobs on the trysting-stone;
A sick man wakes at his own mouth's wail;
A gossip coughs in her thrice-told tale;
A muttering gamester shakes the dice:
A reaper foretells good-luck from the skies;
A monarch vows as he lifts his hand to them;
A patriot leaving his native land to them,
Invokes the world against perjured state;
A priest disserts upon linen skirts;

A sinner screams for one hope more ;
A dancer's feet do palpitate

A piper's music out on the floor;

And nigh to the awful Dead, the living

Low speech and stealthy steps are giving,
Because he cannot hear;

And he who on that narrow bier

Has room enow, is closely wound

In a silence piercing more than sound.

III.

Hearken, hearken!

God speaketh to thy soul;

Using the supreme voice which doth confound All life with consciousness of Deity,

All senses into one;

As the seer-saint of Patmos, loving John,
For whom did backward roll

The cloud-gate of the future, turned to see
The Voice which spake. It speaketh now-
Through the regular breath of the calm creation,
Through the moan of the creature's desolation,
Striking, and in its stroke resembling

The memory of a solemn vow,

Which pierceth the din of a festival

To one in the midst-and he letteth fall

The cup, with a sudden trembling.

IV.

Hearken, hearken!

God speaketh in thy soul;
Saying, "O thou, that movest

With feeble steps across this earth of mine,
To break beside the fount thy golden bowl
And spill its purple wine--

Look up to heaven and see how like a scroll,

My right hand hath thine immortality
In an eternal grasping! Thou, that lovest
The songful birds and grasses underfoot,
And also what change mars, and tombs pollute-
I am the end of love!-give love to me!
O thou that sinnest, grace doth more abound
Than all thy sin! sit still beneath my rood,
And count the droppings of my victim-blood,
And seek none other sound!"

V.

Hearken, hearken!

Shall we hear the lapsing river
And our brother's sighing, ever,
And not the voice of God?

THE COUNTRY CLERGYMAN.-GOLDSMITH.

Near yonder copse, where once the garden smil'd,
And still where many a garden flower grows wild,
There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose,
The village preacher's modest mansion rose.

A man he was to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year;
Remote from towns he ran his godly race,

Nor e'er had chang'd, nor wished to change his place;
Unskilful he to fawn, or seek for power,
By doctrines fashion'd to the varying hour;
Far other aims his heart had learn'd to prize,
More bent to raise the wretched than to rise.
His house was known to all the vagrant train,
He chid their wanderings, but reliev'd their pain;
The long-remember'd beggar was his guest,
Whose beard descending swept his aged breast;
The ruin'd spendthrift, now no longer proud,
Claim'd kindred there, and had his claims allow'd
The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,
Sate by his fire, and talk'd the night away;
Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done,
Shoulder'd his crutch, and show'd how fields were won.

Pleas'd with his guests, the good man learn'd to glow,
And quite forgot their vices in their woe:
Careless their merits or their faults to scan,
His pity gave ere charity began.

Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride,
And e'en his failings lean'd to virtue's side;