Is the emperor a gentleman, with spatters of blood on his clothes, scourged from the backs of noble Hungarian women?
Are the aristocracy gentlefolks, who admire him?
Is Mr.Flamson a gentleman, although he has a million pounds?
No! cowardly miscreants, admirers of cowardly miscreants, and people who make a million pounds by means compared with which those employed to make fortunes by the getters up of the South Sea Bubble might be called honest dealing, are decidedly not gentlefolks.

Now as it is clearly demonstrable that a person may be perfectly genteel according to some standard or other, and yet be no gentleman, so is it demonstrable that a person may have no pretensions to gentility, and yet be a gentleman.

For example, there is Lavengro! Would the admirers of the emperor, or the admirers of those who admire the emperor, or the admirers of Mr.Flamson, call him genteel?
and gentility with them is everything! Assuredly they would not; and assuredly they would consider him respectively as a being to be shunned, despised, or hooted.

Genteel! Why, at one time he is a hack author--writes reviewals for eighteen-pence a page--edits a Newgate chronicle.

At another he wanders the country with a face grimy from occasionally mending kettles; and there is no evidence that his clothes are not seedy and torn, and his shoes down at the heel; but by what process of reasoning will they prove that he is no gentleman?
Is he not learned?
Has he not generosity and courage?
Whilst a hack author, does he pawn the books entrusted to him to review?
Does he break his word to his publisher?
Does he write begging letters?
Does he get clothes or lodgings without paying for them?
Again, whilst a wanderer, does he insult helpless women on the road with loose proposals or ribald discourse?
Does he take what is not his own from the hedges?
Does he play on the fiddle, or make faces in public-houses, in order to obtain pence or beer?
or does he call for liquor, swallow it, and then say to a widowed landlady, "Mistress, I have no brass"?
In a word, what vice and crime does he perpetrate--what low acts does he commit?
Therefore, with his endowments, who will venture to say that he is no gentleman ?--unless it be an admirer of Mr.Flamson--a clown--who will, perhaps, shout--"I say he is no gentleman; for who can be a gentleman who keeps no gig ?" The indifference exhibited by Lavengro for what is merely genteel, compared with his solicitude never to infringe the strict laws of honour, should read a salutary lesson.