The decline of the gentleman is very interesting, but now as it appears along with a thousand other signs of cultural feudalization, I cannot somehow make myself yearn for the gentleman's return. The education of gentlemen is a fundamentally aristocratic act. There is no getting around it -- and this includes the "fundamentally hypocritical" connotation; a gentleman must be blind to his own self-interest and self-regard. There are always those few wonderful examples, but they are equally as rare as the wonderful examples of gentlemanly scientific diligence and genius: notable because of their rarity, but remembered as part of a golden age whose chief characteristic was... (drumroll please) -- the favored position of the gentleman.

Read Shirley Letwin's book, The Gentleman in Trollope, referred to in this article. Anyone who is interested enough in this subject to have read this far would find it fascinating - perhaps even uplifting. It is a work of astute observation and intelligence, on a subject that deserves far more attention than it gets.

I think the report of the demise of the gentleman is exaggerated. I shall give you one example. In the recent horrific shootings in Aurora, Colorado, it was mentioned that three of the victims were young men who died whilst protecting their girlfriends from the shooter by covering the girls with their own bodies.

Doesn't the concept of being a gentleman come from ancient Greece? Did not the Renaissance revivification of such attitudes,adapted by the Christian culture create the European gentleman. Much of what we consider gentlemanly behavior doesn't seem specifically Christian to me but shares characteristics with pagan and oriental variants. A specifically Christian gentleman then may be a stage in a continuing evolution.

In letting the ideal of 'the gentleman' slip into oblivion the modern world has missed the chance to equip itself with an universal ideal or identity-model for adulthood, something it so obviously both needs and lacks. It is not inconceivable that a transition could have been made from the Christian gentleman to a secular ideal of gentleman and gentlewoman, embodying the best we can conceive of in terms of personality, bearing, and dealings. I am afraid that Andrew Gimson is right, however, no such transition has been made. The gentleman is no longer a live ideal, and that should be an occasion for sadness and regret. But perhaps it is still not too late???

The conservative nostalgia for a way we never were always astounds me. As I have just finished reading Dickens's Bleak House, forgive me for demurring from the rosy picture of Victorian morality presented here. The author bestows the accolade of "so great a man" upon that inveterate careerist and opportunist Cardinal Newman, who was so narcissistically impaired that he dealt with every petty theological dispute by moving to another sacred venue and trying once again to have it all his own way. From Calvinism to Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, he moved ever rightward in search for an authoritarianism that he could call his own. But switching never made him more tolerant: he could never endure any dissent from the dogma of whichever catechism he was currently espousing or whichever church he was currently attending. When he was a fervent Anglican at Oxford, he tried to keep his former evangelical associates out. When he became a fervent Catholic in his Third Great Awakening, he wanted Catholics in. Early and late, it must be Newman's Oxford. As Nietzsche said: "A religious person thinks only of himself." But I suppose Newman was a gentleman--held the door for any ladies who had to be expelled from the Oxford library. The good old days!

That's Alec Douglas-Home, Bernie, not Hume. You're confusing him with a lesser order of Humes. Goodness, how quickly we forget. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The monstrous burden taken on by my parents to educate my brother and me in the preparatory and public school system in the UK may not have been entirely wasted. Although my brother determined that school was not for him by his mid-teens, I was too chicken to run away, and endured the full gamut of 12 years in two institutions. I look back on that time with little emotion, but have daily been gratified by evidence that my education (in the literal sense) conferred on me a humanistic discipline to always consider the perspectives and interests of the other party. "Do unto others ...." is the one great philosophical tenet of behaviour which these twelve years of schooling gave me. It may be presumptuous to assume that I am a "gentleman" by virtue of this education, but the truth is that the syllabus and teaching examples are sorely lacking in today's curricula and styles of schooling. God bless my parents for their sacrifice!

My dear Bernard the Falconer, there is at least one gentleman left in the world. Good day to you, sir - good day to you!

Although I am neither English nor Christian nor a graduate of any of the mentioned institutions I try to behave decently to all humans and whatever animals come within my contacts. I take occasional exception to mosquitoes and cockroaches but I try to be fair. Turning the other cheek to some creatures of the lower species such as the bulk of politicians and those engaged in financial manipulation merely presents them with opportunities so they must be treated with the harshest responses.