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Show Miscellany What Is a Gentleman? From more or less successful efforts to define the snob and the bore there i, only a step to the more or 1MB un UOMMfnl efforts o define the gentle man. The bore and the snob are ac Usable creatures, plain to the vie. o all men and reducible to formula. But The gentleman Is Intangible and u I-matelv I-matelv Indefinable. The bore and the snob are revealed by their WOMJa i ana their deeds. whereas the gent e mar. can prove himself only by his spirit it Is no wonder that the multitudinous definitions shot at this shining mark have failed to pierce the center. VB if one or another may now and again have hit the margin of the target. One of the more obvious reasons ror this diversity of definition is that the word has changed its meaning and is likely to keep on changing it as m advance ad-vance In civilization. Once upon a time It had a clear and sharply limited legal content recorded by Blackstone In i M0 commentaries; the great lawyer defined a gentleman as one "who bears coai-armor, coai-armor, the grant of which adds gentility gen-tility to one's family." This Is still a fit definition of the gentilhomme in France; it is probably not now a fully satisfactory definition of the gentleman in Great Britain; and it never has been an acceptable definition of the gentleman gentle-man in the United States. To an American Ameri-can there Is a pitiful snobbishness in Ruskln's remark that v the principles of education propounded by Plato apply ap-ply only to "the persons we call gentlementhat gen-tlementhat is to say, landholders living liv-ing on slave labor." Yet Ruskln is only putting forth a little more offensively than others an opinion often held in England. This opinion Is most concretely con-cretely expressed In the fable dialogue between the English lord and the American Ameri-can girl, which begins with his tactful tact-ful assertion that there are so few gentlemen in America, to which she responded re-sponded with the question, "But who do you call gentlemen?" And when he explains that gentlemen are "men who do not work." she retorts swiftly. "But we have lots of those In America only we call them tramps." Scrlbner's Magazine. |