Friend of Hamenity.

THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY AND
THE KNIFE-GRINDER.

IN ENGLISH SAPPHICS.

[Right Hon. George Canning, born in London, 11th | April, 1770; died in Chiswick, 8th August, 1827. His life was devoted to po.itics-it is said at the instigation of Sheridan-and he became prime minister in the beginning of the year in which he died. He was one of the champions of the Catholic Emancipation move

ment.

From early youth he was in the habit of writing prose and verse. When a school-boy at Eton he commenced a weekly periodical called the Microcosm, which was written by himself and two companions. The following satire upon the extreme republican spirit to which the French Revolution gave so great an impetus, was one of the most powerful squibs of the period. It first appeared in the Anti-Jacobin, and the Rt. Hon. J. H. Fiere is said to have written part of it.]

Fiend of Humanity.

"Needy Knife grinder, whither are you going?
Rough is the road. your wheel is out of order-
Bleak blows the blast; - your hat has got a hole in't,
So have your breeches!
"Weary Knife grinder little think the proud ones,
Who in their coaches roll along the turnpike-
Road, what hard work 'tis crying all day, 'Knives and
Scissors to grind, O!'
"Tell me Knife-grinder, how came you to grind knives?
Did some rich man tyrannically use you?
Was it the squire? or parson of the parish?

Or the attorney?

"Was it the squire for killing of his game? or
Covetous parson, for his tithes distraining?
Or roguish lawyer made you lose your little

All in a lawsuit?

“(Have you not read the Rights of Man, by Tom Paine?)

Drops of compassion tremble on my eyelids,
Ready to fall, as soon as you have told your

Pitiful story."

Knife-grinder.
"Story! Lord bless you! I have none to tell, sir,
Only last night a drinking at the Chequers,
This poor old hat and breeches, as you see, were

Torn in a scuffle.

"Constables came up for to take me into Custody; they took me before the Justice; Justice Oldmixon put me in the parish

Stocks for a vagrant.

"I give thee sixpence! I will see thee damn'd firstWretch whom no sense of wrongs can rouse to ven

geance

Sordid, unfeeling, reprobate, degraded,

Spiritless outcast!"

(Kicks the Knife-grinder, overturns his wheel, and exit in a transport of republican enthusiasm and unive, su philan hropy.)

VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION.

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. One must feel a strong tendency to that which one is 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 endeavouring 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 neighbours 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 reversed 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 everything by name, fashion, opinion; and henre, from the conscious absence of real With politics, sir." qualities or sincere satisfaction in itself, it

"I should be glad to drink your honour's health in
A pot of beer, if you will give me sixpence;
But for my part, I never love to meddle

ance.

builds its supercilious and fantastic conceit on | for the untutored rustic, she would herself the the wretchedness and wants of others. Violent next day be delighted with the very same antipathies are always suspicious, and betray shaped bonnet if brought her by a French a secret affinity. The difference between the milliner and told it was all the fashion, and in "Great Vulgar and the Small" is mostly in a week's time will become quite familiar with outward circumstances. The coxcomb criticizes the maid, and chatter with her (upon equal the dress of the clown, as the pedant cavils at terms) about caps and ribbons and lace by the the bad grammar of the illiterate, or the prude is hour together. There is no difference between shocked at the backslidings of her frail acquaint- them but that of situation in the kitchen or in Those who have the fewest resources the parlour: let circumstances bring them in themselves, naturally seek the food of their together, and they fit like hand and glove. It self-love elsewhere. The most ignorant people is like mistress, like maid. Their talk, their find most to laugh at in strangers: scandal and thoughts, their dreams, their likings and dissatire prevail most in country-places; and a likes, are the same. The mistress' head runs propensity to ridicule every the slightest or continually on dress and finery, so does the most palpable deviation from what we happen maid's: the young lady longs to ride in a coach to approve, ceases with the progress of common- and six, so does the maid if she could: miss sense and decency. True worth does not forms a beau-ideal of a lover with black eyes exult in the faults and deficiencies of others; and rosy cheeks, which does not differ from as true refinement turns away from grossness that of her attendant: both like a smart man, and deformity, instead of being tempted to in- the one the footman and the other his master, dulge in an unmanly triumph over it. Raphael for the same reason: both like handsome furwould not faint away at the daubing of a sign- niture and fine houses: both apply the terms post, nor Homer hold his head the higher for shocking and disagreeable to the same things being in the company of a Grub Street bard. and persons: both have a great notion of balls, Real power, real excellence, does not seek for plays, treats, song-books and love-tales: both a foil in inferiority; nor fear contamination like a wedding or a christening, and both from coming in contact with that which is would give their little fingers to see a coronacoarse and homely. It reposes on itself, and tion, with this difference, that the one has a is equally free from spleen and affectation. chance of getting a seat at it, and the other is But the spirit of gentility is the mere essence dying with envy that she has not. of spleen and affectation;-of affected delight in its own would-be qualifications, and of ineff able disdain poured out upon the involuntary blunders or accidental disadvantages of those whom it chooses to treat as its inferiors.

Thus a fashionable miss titters till she is ready to burst her sides at the uncouth shape of a bonnet, or the abrupt drop of a courtesy (such as Jeanie Deans would make) in a country girl who comes to be hired by her mamma as a servant-yet to show how little foundation there is for this hysterical expression of her extreme good opinion of herself and contempt

"If a European, when he has cut off his beard and put false hair on his head, or bound up his own natural hair in regular hard knots, as unlike nature as he can possibly make it; and after having rendered them im

movable by the help of the fat of hogs, has covered the

whole with flour, laid on by a machine with the utmost regularity: if when thus attired he issues forth, and meets a Cherokee Indian, who has bestowed as much time at his toilet, and laid on with equal care and attention his yellow and red ochre on particular parts of his forehead or cheeks, as he judges most becoming; whoever of these two despises the other for this attention to the fashion of his country, whichever first feels himself provoked to laugh, is the barbarian."-Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses, vol. i. p. 231-32.

Indeed, this last is a ceremony that delights equally the greatest monarch and the meanest of his subjects-the vilest of the rabble. Yet this which is the height of gentility and the consummation of external distinction and splendour, is, I should say, a vulgar ceremony. For what degree of refinement, of capacity, of virtue is required in the individual who is so distinguished, or is necessary to his enjoying this idle and imposing parade of his person? Is he delighted with the state-coach and gilded panels? So is the poorest wretch that gazes at it. Is he struck with the spirit, the beauty and symmetry of the eight cream-coloured horses? There is not one of the immense nul titude, who flock to see the sight from town or country, St. Giles's or Whitechapel, young or old, rich or poor, gentle or simple, who does not agree to admire the same object. Is he delighted with the yeomen of the guard, the military escort, the groups of ladies, the badges of sovereign power, the kingly crown, the marshal's truncheon and the judge's robe, the array that precedes and follows him, the crowded streets, the windows hung with eager looks? So are the mob, for they "have eyes and see them!" There is no one faculty of

mind or body, natural or acquired, essential to | very little, if at all, better informed, cry it the principal figure in this procession more than is common to the meanest and most despised attendant on it. A wax-work figure would answer the same purpose: a lord-mayor of London has as much tinsel to be proud of. I would rather have a king do something that no one else has the power or magnanimity to do, or say something that no one else has the wisdom to say, or look more handsome, more thoughtful, or benign than any one else in his dominions. But I see nothing to raise one's idea of him in his being made a show of: if the pageant would do as well without the man, the man would do as well without the pageant! Kings have been declared to be "lovers of low company:" and this maxim, besides the reason sometimes assigned for it, viz., that they meet with less opposition to their wills from such persons, will I suspect be found to turn at last on the consideration I am here stating, that they also meet with more sympathy in their tastes. The most ignorant and thoughtless have the greatest admiration of the baubles, the outward symbols of pomp and power, the sound and show, which are the habitual delight and mighty prerogative of kings. The stupid est slave worships the gaudiest tyrant. The same gross motives appeal to the same gross capacities, flatter the pride of the superior and excite the servility of the dependant: whereas a higher reach of moral and intellectual refinement might seek in vain for higher proofs of internal worth and inherent majesty in the object of its idolatry, and not finding the divinity lodged within, the unreasonable expectation raised would probably end in mortifica- | tion on both sides!-There is little to distinguish a king from his subjects but the rabble's shout -if he loses that and is reduced to the forlorn hope of gaining the suffrages of the wise and good, he is of all men the most miserable.But enough of this.

The essence of vulgarity, I imagine, consists in taking manners, actions, words, opinions on trust from others, without examining one's own feelings or weighing the merits of the case. It is coarseness or shallowness of taste arising from want of individual refinement, together with the confidence and presumption inspired by example and numbers. It may be defined to be a prostitution of the mind or body to ape the more or less obvious defects of others, because by so doing we shall secure the suff rages of those we associate with. To affect a gesture, an opinion, a phrase, because it is the rage with a large number of persons, or to hold it in abhorrence because another set of persons

down to distinguish themselves from the former, is in either case equal vulgarity and absurdity. --A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common. 'Tis common to breathe, to see, to feel, to live. Nothing is vulgar that is natural, spontaneous, unavoidable. Grossness is not vulgarity, ignorance is not vulgarity, awkwardness is not vulgarity: but all these become vulgar when they are affected and shown off on the authority of others, or to fall in with the fashion or the company we keep. Caliban is coarse enough, but surely he is not vulgar. We might as well spurn the clod under our feet, and call it vulgar. Cobbett is coarse enough, but he is not vulgar. He does not belong to the herd. Nothing real, nothing original can be vulgar: but I should think an imitator of Cobbett a vulgar man. Emery's Yorkshireman is vulgar, because he is a Yorkshireman. It is the cant and gibberish, the cunning and low life of a particular district; it has "a stamp exclusive and provincial.' He might "gabble most brutishly" and yet not fall under the letter of the definition: but "his speech bewrayeth him," his dialect (like the jargon of a Bond Street lounger) is the damning circumstance. If he were a mere blockhead, it would not signify: but he thinks himself a knowing hand, according to the notions and practices of those with whom he was brought up, and which he thinks the go everywhere. In a word, this character is not the offspring of untutored nature but of bad habits; it is made up of ignorance and conceit. It has a mixture of slang in it. All slang phrases are for the same reason vulgar; but there is nothing vulgar in the common English idiom. Simplicity is not vulgarity; but the looking to affectation of any sort for distinction is. A cockney is a vulgar character, whose imagination cannot wander beyond the suburbs of the metropolis: so is a fellow who is always thinking of the High Street, Edinburgh. We want a name for this last character. An opinion is vulgar that is stewed in the rank breath of the rabble: nor is it a bit purer or more refined for having passed through the well-cleansed teeth of a whole court. The inherent vulgarity is in having no other feeling on any subject than the crude, blind, headlong, gregarious notion acquired by sympathy with the mixed multitude or with a fastidious minority, who are just as insensible to the real truth and as indifferent to everything but their own frivolous and vexatious pretensions. The upper are not wiser than the lower orders, because they resolve to differ from them. The

fashionable have the advantage of the unfashion- | last shilling out of their pockets and the last able in nothing but the fashion. The true drop of blood out of their veins. If the headvulgar are the servum pecus imitatorum-the strong self-will and unruly turbulence of a herd of pretenders to what they do not feel and common ale-house are shocking, what shall we to what is not natural to them, whether in say to the studied insincerity, the insipid want high or low life. To belong to any class, to of common-sense, the callous insensibility of move in any rank or sphere of life, is not a the drawing-room and boudoir? I would very exclusive distinction or test of refinement. rather see the feelings of our common nature Refinement will in all classes be the exception, (for they are the same at bottom) expressed in not the rule; and the exception may fall out the most naked and unqualified way, than see in one class as well as another. A king is but every feeling of our nature suppressed, stifled, an hereditary title. A nobleman is only one hermetically sealed under the smooth, cold, of the House of Peers. To be a knight or glittering varnish of pretended refinement and alderman is confessedly a vulgar thing. The conventional politeness. The one may be corking the other day made Sir Walter Scott a rected by being better informed; the other is baronet, but not all the power of the three incorrigible, wilful, heartless depravity. I estates could make another author of Waverley. cannot describe the contempt and disgust I Princes, heroes are often common-place people: have felt at the tone of what would be thought Hamlet was not a vulgar character, neither good company, when I have witnessed the was Don Quixote. sleek, smiling, glossy, gratuitous assumption There is a well-dressed and an ill-dressed of superiority to every feeling of humanity, mob, both which I hate. Odi profanum honesty, or principle, as a part of the etiquette, vulgus, et arceo.. The vapid affectation of the the mental and moral costume of the table, and one is to me even more intolerable than the every profession of toleration or favour for the gross insolence and brutality of the other. If lower orders, that is, for the great mass of our a set of low-lived fellows are noisy, rude, and fellow-creatures, treated as an indecorum and boisterous to show their disregard of the com- breach of the harmony of well-regulated society. pany, a set of fashionable coxcombs are, to a In short, I prefer a bear-garden to the adder's nauseous degree, finical and effeminate to show den. Or to put this case in its extremest point their thorough breeding. The one are governed of view, I have more patience with men in a by their feelings, however coarse and misguided, rude state of nature outraging the human form, which is something: the others consult only than I have with apes "making mops and appearances, which are nothing, either as a mows" at the extravagances they have first test of happiness or virtue. Hogarth in his provoked. I can endure the brutality (as it is prints has trimmed the balance of pretension termed) of mobs better than the inhumanity of between the downright blackguard and the courts. The violence of the one rages like a soi-disant fine gentleman unanswerably. It fire; the insidious policy of the other strikes does not appear in his moral demonstrations like a pestilence, and is more fatal and inevit(whatever it may do in the genteel letter-writing able. The slow poison of despotism is worse of Lord Chesterfield, or the chivalrous rhap- than the convulsive struggles of anarchy. "Of sodies of Burke), that vice by losing all its all evils," says Hume, "anarchy is the shortest grossness loses half its evil. It becomes more lived." The one may "break out like a wild contemptible, not less disgusting. What is overthrow;" but the other from its secret, there in common, for instance, between his sacred stand, operates unseen, and undermines beaux and belles, his rakes and his coquets, the happiness of kingdoms for ages, lurks in and the men and women, the true heroic and the hollow cheek and stares you in the face in ideal characters in Raphael? But his people the ghastly eye of want, and agony, and woc. of fashion and quality are just upon a par with It is dreadful to hear the noise and uproar of the low, the selfish, the unideal characters in an infuriated multitude stung by the sense of the contrasted view of human life, and are wrong, and maddened by sympathy: it is more often the very same characters, only changing appalling to think of the smile answered by places. If the lower ranks are actuated by other gracious smiles, of the whisper echoed envy and uncharitableness towards the upper, by other assenting whispers, which doom them the latter have scarcely any feelings but of first to despair and then to destruction. Popupride, contempt, and aversion to the lower. If lar fury finds its counterpart in courtly servility. the poor would pull down the rich to get at If every outrage is to be apprehended from the their good things, the rich would tread down one, every iniquity is deliberately sanctioned the poor as in a vine-press, and squeeze the by the other, without regard to justice or