year, and one of his most frequent associates in undergraduate days.]

"They say that parts of my essay were vulgar.

"Your affectionate grandson,

"CHAS. W. DILKE."

That last sentence roused the old critic:

"I should like to read the _whole_ essay. My especial interest is
aroused by the charge of occasional _vulgarity_. If it be true, it is
not improbable that the writer caught the infection from his
grandfather. With one half the world, in its judgment of literature
and of life, vulgarity is the opposite of gentility, and gentility is
merely negative, and implies _the absence of all character_, and, in
language, of all idiom, all bone and muscle. I have a notion--only do
not whisper such heresy within college walls--that a college tutor
must be genteel in his _college judgments_, that 'The Polite Letter
Writer' was the work of an M.A. in the 'Augustan Age.' You may find in
Shakespeare household words and phrases from every condition and walk
in life--as much coarseness as you please to look for--anything and
everything except gentility and vulgarity. Occasional vulgarity is,
therefore, a question on which _I_ refuse to take the opinion of any
man not well known to me."

On one matter the pupil was recalcitrant. Mr. Dilke begged him to give
"one hour or one half-hour a day" to mastering Greek, so as to be able to
read it with pleasure--a mastery which could only be acquired "before you
enter on the direct purpose and business of life." But "insuperable