Chapter VIII: Part II (1)

In our last, we had occasion to speak sharply of that class of our aristocratic youth known by the name of fast fellows, and it may be thought that we characterized their foibles rather pointedly, and tinctured our animadversions with somewhat of undue asperity. This charge, however, can be made with no ground of reason or justice: the fact is, we only lashed the follies for which that class of men are pre-eminent, but left their vices in the shade, in the hope that the _raw_ we have already established, will shame the fast fellows into a sense of the proprieties of conduct due to themselves and their station.

The misfortune is, that these fast fellows forget, in the pursuit of their favourite follies, that the mischief to society begins only with themselves: that man is naturally a servile, imitative animal; and that he follows in the track of a great name, as vulgar muttons run at the heels of a belwether. The poison of fashionable folly runs comparatively innocuous while it circulates in fashionable veins; but when vulgar fellows are innoculated with the virus, it becomes a plague, a moral small-pox, distorting, disfiguring the man's mind, pockpitting his small modicum of brains, and blinding his mind's eye to the supreme contempt his awkward vagaries inspire.

The fast fellows rejoice exceedingly in the spread of their servile imitation of fashionable folly, this gentlemanly profligacy at second-hand; and perhaps this is the worst trait in their character, for it is at once malicious and unwise: malicious, because the contemplation of humanity, degraded by bad example in high station, should rather be a source of secret shame than of devilish gratification: unwise, because their example is a discredit to their order, and a danger. To posses birth, fashion, station, wealth, power, is title enough to envy, and handle sufficient for scandal. How much stronger becomes that title--how much longer that handle--when men, enjoying this pre-eminence, enjoy it, not using, but abusing their good fortune!

We should not have troubled our heads with the fast fellows at all, if it were not absolutely essential to the full consideration of our subject, widely to sever the prominent classes of fashionable life, and to have no excuse for continuing in future to confound them. We have now done with the fast fellows, and shall like them the more the less we hear of them.

CONCERNING SLOW FELLOWS.

The SLOW SCHOOL of fashionable or aristocratic life, comprises those who think that, in the nineteenth century, other means must be taken to preserve their order in its high and responsible position than those which, in dark ages, conferred honour upon the tallest or the bravest. They think, and think wisely, that the only method of keeping above the masses, in this active-minded age, is by soaring higher and further into the boundless realms of intellect; or at the least forgetting, in a fair neck-and-neck race with men of meaner birth, their purer blood, and urging the generous contest for fame, regardless of the allurements of pleasure, or the superior advantages of fortune. In truth, we might ask, what would become of our aristocratic classes ere long, if they came, as a body, to be identified with their gambling lords, their black-leg baronets, their insolvent honourables, and the seedy set of Chevaliers Diddlerowski and Counts Scaramouchi, who caper on the platform outside for their living? The populace would pelt these harlequin horse-jockeys of fashionable life off their stage, if there was nothing better to be seen inside; but it fortunately happens that there is better.

We can boast among our nobles and aristocratic families, a few men of original, commanding, and powerful intellect; many respectable in most departments of intellectual rivalry; many more laborious, hard-working men; and about the same proportion of dull, stupid, fat-headed, crabbed, conceited, ignorant, insolent men, that you may find among the same given number of those commonly called the educated classes. We refer you to the aristocracies of other countries, and we think we may safely say, that we have more men of that class, in this country, who devote themselves to the high duties of their station, regardless of its pleasures, than in any other: men who recognize practically the responsibility of their rank, and do not shirk from them; men who think they have something to do, and something to repay, for the accidents of birth and fortune--who, in the senate, in the field, or in the less prominent, but not less noble, career of private life, act, as they feel, with the poet:

"At heros, et decus, et quæ non fecimus ipsi,
Vix ea nostra voco."

It has been admirably remarked, by some one whose name we forget, that the grand advantage of high birth is, placing a man as far forward at twenty-five as another man is at fifty. We might, as a corollary to this undeniable proposition, add, that birth not only places, but keeps a man in that advance of his fellows, which in the sum of life makes such vast ultimate difference in the prominence of their position.

This advantage enjoyed by the aristocracy of birth, of early enrolling themselves among the aristocracy of power, has, like every thing in the natural and moral world, its compensating disadvantage: they lose in one way what they gain in another; and although many of them become eminent in public life, few, very few, comparatively with the numbers who enter the arena, become great. They are respected, heard, and admired, by virtue of a class-prepossession in their favour; yet, after all, they must select from the ranks of the aristocracy of talent their firmest and best supporters, to whom they may delegate the heavy responsibilities of business, and lift from their own shoulders the burden of responsible power.

One striking example of the force of birth, station, and association in public life, never fails to occur to us, as an extraordinary example of the magnifying power of these extrinsic qualities, in giving to the aristocracy of birth a consideration, which, though often well bestowed, is yet oftener bestowed without any desert whatever; and that title to admiration and respect, which has died with ancestry, patriotism, and suffering in the cause of freedom, is transferred from the illustrious dead to the undistinguished living.

Without giving a catalogue _raisonné_ of the slow fellows, (we use the term not disrespectfully, but only in contradistinction to the others,) we may observe that, besides the public service in which the great names are sufficiently known, you have poets, essayists, dramatists, astronomers, geologists, travellers, novelists, and, what is better than all, philanthropists. In compliment to human nature, we take the liberty merely to mention the names of Lord Dudley Stuart and Lord Ashley. The works of the slow fellows, especially their poetry, indicate in a greater or less degree the social position of the authors; seldom or never deficient in good taste, and not without feeling, they lack power and daring. The smooth style has their preference, and their verses smack of the school of Lord Fanny; indeed, we know not that, in poetry or prose, we can point out one of our slow fellows of the present day rising above judicious mediocrity. It is a curious fact, that the most daring and original of our noble authors have, in their day, been fast fellows; it is only necessary to name Rochester, Buckingham, and Byron.

Among the slow fellows, are multitudes of pretenders to intellect in a small way. These patronize a drawing-master, not to learn to draw, but to learn to talk of drawing; they also study the _Penny Magazine_ and other profound works, to the same purpose; they patronize the London University, and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, as far as lending their names; for, being mostly of the class of fashionable _screws_, they take care never to subscribe to any thing. They have a refined taste in shawls, and are consequently in the confidence of dressy old women, who hold them up as examples of every thing that is good. They take chocolate of a morning, and tea in the evening; drink sherry with a biscuit, and wonder how people _can_ eat those hot lunches. They take constitutional walks and Cockle's pills; and, by virtue of meeting them at the Royal Society, are always consulting medical men, but take care never to offer them a guinea. They talk of music, of which they know something--of books, of which they know little--and of pictures, of which they know less; they have always read "the last novel," which is as much as they can well carry; they know literary, professional, and scientific men at Somerset House, but, if they meet them in Park Lane, look as if they never saw them before; they are very peevish, have something to say against every man, and always say the worst first; they are very quiet in their manner, almost sly, and never use any of the colloquialisms of the fast fellows; they treat their inferiors with great consideration, addressing them, "honest friend," "my good man," and so on, but have very little heart, and less spirit.

They equally abhor the fast fellows and the pretenders to fashion. They are afraid of the former, who are always ridiculing them and their pursuits, by jokes theoretical and practical. If the fast fellows ascertain that a slow fellow affects sketching, they club together to annoy him, talking of the "autumnal tints," and "the gilding of the western hemisphere;" if a botanist, they send him a cow-cabbage, or a root of mangel-wurzel, with a serious note, stating, that they hear it is a great curiosity in _his line_; if an entomologist, they are sure to send him away "with a flea in his ear." If he affects poetry, the fast fellows make one of their servants transcribe, from _Bell's Life_, Scroggins's poetical version of the fight between Bendigo and Bungaree, or some such stuff; and, having got the slow fellow in a corner, insist upon having his opinion, and drive him nearly mad. All these, and a thousand other pranks, the fast fellows play upon their slow brethren, not in the hackneyed fashion which low people call "_gagging_," and genteel people "_quizzing_," but with a seriousness and gravity that heightens all the joke, and makes the slow fellow inexpressibly ridiculous.

It is astonishing, considering the opportunities of the slow fellows, that they do not make a better figure; it seems wonderful, that they who glide swiftly down the current of fortune with wind and tide, should be distanced by those who, close-hauled upon a wind, are beating up against it all their lives; but so it is;--the compensating power that rules material nature, governs the operations of the mind. To whom much is given of opportunity, little is bestowed of the exertion to improve it. Those who rely more or less on claims extrinsic, are sure to be surpassed by those whose power is from within. After all, the great names of our nation (with here and there an exception to prove the rule) are plebeian.

OF THE ARISTOCRACY OF POWER.

In their political capacity, people of fashion, among whom, for the present purpose, we include the whole of the aristocracy, are the common butt of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness.

They are accused of standing between the mass of the people and their inalienable rights; of opposing, with obstinate resistance, the progress of rational liberty, and of----but, in short, you have only to glance over the pages of any democratic newspaper, to be made aware of the horrible political iniquity of the aristocracy of England.

The aristocracy in England, considered politically, is a subject too broad, too wide, and too deep for us, we most readily confess; nor is it exactly proper for a work of a sketchy nature, in which we only skim lightly along the surface of society, picking up any little curiosity as we go along, but without dipping deep into motives or habits of thought or action, especially in state affairs.

Since our late lamented friends, the Whigs, have gone to enjoy a virtuous retirement and dignified ease, we have taken no delight in politics. There is no fun going on now-a-days--no quackery, no mountebankery, no asses, colonial or otherwise. The dull jog-trot fellows who have got into Downing Street have made politics no joke; and now that silence, as of the tomb, reigns amongst _quondam_ leaders of the Treasury Benech--now that the camp-followers have followed the leader, and the auxiliaries are dispersed, we really have nobody to laugh at; and, like our departed friends, have too little of the statesman to be serious about serious matters.

With regard to the aristocracy in their public capacity, this is the way we always look at them.

In the first place, they govern us through the tolerance of public opinion, as men having station, power, property, much to lose, and little comparatively to gain--men who have put in bail to a large amount for their good behaviour: and, in the second place, they govern us, because really and truly there are so many outrageously discordant political quacks, desirous of taking our case in hand, that we find it our interest to entrust our public health to an accomplished physician, even although he charges a guinea a visit, and refuses to insure a perfect cure with a box of pills costing thirteenpence-halfpenny. There can be no doubt whatever, that the most careful men are the men who have most to care for: he that has a great deal to lose, will think twice, where he that has nothing to lose, will not think at all: and the government of this vast and powerful empire, we imagine, with great deference, must require a good deal of thinking. In a free press, we have a never-dying exponent of public opinion, a perpetual advocate of rational liberty, and a powerful engine for the exposure, which is ultimately the redress, of wrong: and although this influential member of our government receives no public money, nor is called right honourable, nor speaks in the House, yet in fact and in truth it has a seat in the Cabinet, and, upon momentous occasions, a voice of thunder.

That the aristocracy of power should be in advance of public opinion, is not in the nature of things, and should no more be imputed as a crime to them, than to us not to run when we are not in a hurry: they cannot, as a body, move upwards, because they stand so near the top, that dangerous ambition is extinguished; and it is hardly to be expected that, as a body, they should move downwards, unless they find themselves supported in their position upon the right of others, in which case we have always seen that, although they descend gradually, they descend at last.

This immobility of our aristocracy is the origin of the fixity of our political institutions, which has been, is, and will continue to be, the great element of our pre-eminence as a nation: it possesses a force corrective and directive, and at once restrains the excess, while it affords a point of resistance, to the current of the popular will. And this immobility, it should never be forgotten, is owing to that very elevation so hated and so envied: wanting which the aristocracy would be subject to the vulgar ambitions, vulgar passions, and sordid desires of meaner aspirants after personal advantage and distinction. It is a providential blessing, we firmly believe, to a great nation to possess a class, by fortune and station, placed above the unseemly contentions of adventurers in public life: looked up to as men responsible without hire for the public weal, and, without sordid ambitions of their own, solicitous to preserve it: looked up to, moreover, as examples of that refinement of feeling, jealous sense of honour, and manly independence, serving as detersives of the grosser humours of commercial life, and which, filtering through the successive _strata_ of society, clarify and purify in their course, leaving the very dregs the cleaner for their passage.

A body thus by habit and constitution opposed to innovation, and determined against the recklessness of inconsiderate reforms, has furnished a stock argument to those who delight in "going a-head" faster than their feet, which are the grounds of their arguments, can carry them. We hear the aristocracy called stumbling-blocks in the way of legislative improvements, and, with greater propriety of metaphor, likened to drags upon the wheel of progressive reform; and so on, through all the regions of illustration, until we are in at the death of the metaphor. How happens to be overlooked the advantage of this anti-progressive barrier, to the concentration and deepening of the flood of opinion on any given subject? how is it that men are apt altogether to forget that this very barrier it is which prevents the too eager crowd from trampling one another to death in their haste? which gives time for the ebullitions of unreasoning zeal, and reckless enthusiasm, and the dregs of agitation, quietly to subside; and, for all that, bears the impress of reason and sound sense to circulate with accumulated pressure through the public mind? Were it not for the barrier which the aristocracy of power thus interposes for a time, only to withdraw when the time for interposition is past, we should live in a vortex of revolution and counter-revolution. Our whole time, and our undivided energies, would be employed in acting hastily, and repenting at leisure; in repining either because our biennial revolutions went too far, or did not go far enough; in expending our national strength in the unprofitable struggles of faction with faction, adventurer with adventurer: with every change we should become more changeful, and with every settlement more unsettled: one by one our distant colonies would follow the bright example of our people at home, and our commerce and trade would fall with our colonial empire. In fine, we should become in the eyes of the world what France now is--a people ready to sacrifice every solid advantage, every gradual, and therefore permanent, improvement, every ripening fruit that time and care, and the sunshine of peace only can mature, to a genius for revolution.

This turbulent torrent of headlong reform, to-day flooding its banks, to-morrow dribbling in a half-dry channel, the aristocracy of power collects, concentrates, and converts into a power, even while it circumscribes it, and represses. So have we seen a mountain stream useless in summer, dangerous in winter, now a torrent now a puddle, wasting its unprofitable waters in needless brawling; let a barrier be opposed to its downward course, let it be dammed up, let a point of resistance be afforded where its waters may be gathered together, and regulated, you find it turned to valuable account, acting with men's hands, becoming a productive labourer, and contributing its time and its industry to advance the general sum of rational improvement.

From the material to the moral world you may always reason by analogy. If you study the theory of revolutions, you will not fail to observe that, wherever, in constructing your barrier, you employ ignorant engineers, who have not duly calculated the depth and velocity of the current; whenever you raise your dam to such a height that no flood will carry away the waste waters; whenever you talk of finality to the torrent, saying, thus long shalt thou flow, and no longer; whenever you put upon your power a larger wheel than it can turn--you are slowly but surely preparing for that flood which will overwhelm your work, destroy your mills, your dams, and your engines; in a word, you are the remote cause of a revolution.

This is the danger into which aristocracies of power are prone to fall: the error of democracies is, to delight in the absolutism of liberty; but thus it is with liberty itself, that true dignity of man, that parent of all blessings: absolute and uncontrolled, a tyranny beyond the power to endure itself, the worst of bad masters, a fool who is his own client; restrained and tempered, it becomes a wholesome discipline, a property with its rights and its duties, a sober responsibility, bringing with it, like all other responsibilities, its pleasures and its cares; not a toy to be played with, nor even a jewel to be worn in the bonnet, but a talent to be put out to interest, and enjoyed in the unbroken tranquillity of national thankfulness and peace.

Another defect in the aristocracy of power is, the narrow sphere of their sympathies, extending only to those they know, and are familiar with; that is to say, only as far as the circumference of their own limited circle. This it is that renders them keenly apprehensive of danger close at hand, but comparatively indifferent to that which menaces them from a distance. Placed upon a lofty eminence, they are comparatively indifferent while clouds obscure, and thunder rattles along the vale; their resistance is of a passive kind, directed not to the depression of those beneath them, nor to overcome pressure from above, but to preserve themselves in the enviable eminence of their position, and there to establish themselves in permanent security.

As a remedy for this short-sightedness, the result of their isolated position, the aristocracy of power is always prompt to borrow from the aristocracy of talent that assistance in the practical working of its government which it requires; they are glad to find safe men among the people to whom they can delegate the cares of office, the annoyances of patronage, and the odium of power; and, the better to secure these men, they are always ready to lift them among themselves, to identify them with their exclusive interests, and to give them a permanent establishment among the nobles of the land.

* * * * *

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DRESS.

Perhaps we may be expected to say something of the dress of men of fashion, as it is peculiar, and not less characteristic than their manner. Their clothes, like their lives, are usually of a neutral tint; staring colours they studiously eschew, and are never seen with elaborate gradations of under waistcoats. They would as soon appear out of doors _in cuerpo_, as in blue coats with gilt buttons, or braided military frocks, or any dress smacking of the professional. When they indulge in fancy colours and patterns, you will not fail to remark that these are not worn, although imitated by others. The moment a dressy man of fashion finds that any thing he has patronized gets abroad, he drops the neckcloth or vest, or whatever it may be, and condemns the tailor as an "unsafe" fellow. But it is not often that even the most dressy of our men of fashion originate any thing _outré_, or likely to attract attention; of late years their style has been plain, almost to scrupulosity.

Notwithstanding that the man of fashion is plainly dressed, no more than ordinary penetration is required to see that he is excellently well dressed. His coat is plain, to be sure, much plainer than the coat of a Jew-clothesman, having neither silk linings, nor embroidered pocket-holes, nor cut velvet buttons, nor fur collar; but see how it fits him--not like cast iron, nor like a wet sack, but as if he had been born in it.

There is a harmony, a propriety in the coat of a man of fashion, an unstudied ease, a graceful symmetry, a delicacy of expression, that has always filled us with the profoundest admiration of the genius of the artist; indeed, no ready money could purchase coats that we have seen--coats that a real love of the subject, and working upon long credit, for a high connexion, could alone have given to the world--coats, not the dull conceptions of a geometric cutter, spiritlessly outlined upon the shop-board by the crayon of a mercenary foreman, but the fortunate creation of superior intelligence, boldly executed in the happy moments of a generous enthusiasm!

Vain, very vain is it for the pretender to fashion to go swelling into the _atelier_ of a first-rate coat architect, with his ready money in his hand, to order such a coat! _Order_ such a coat, forsooth! order a Raphael, a Michael Angelo, an epic poem. Such a coat--we say it with the generous indignation of a free Briton--is one of the exclusive privileges reserved, by unjust laws, to a selfish aristocracy!

The aristocratic trouser-cutter, too, deserves our unlimited approbation. Nothing more distinguishes the nineteenth century, in which those who can manage it have the happiness to live, than the precision we have attained in trouser-cutting. While yet the barbarism of the age, or poverty of customers, _vested_ the office of trouser-cutter and coat architect in the same functionary, coats were without _soul_, and "inexpressibles" inexpressibly bad, or, as Coleridge would have said, "ridiculous exceedingly." In our day, on the contrary, we have attained to such a pitch of excellence, that the trouser-cutter who fails to give expression to his works, is hunted into the provinces, and condemned for life to manufacture nether garments for clergymen and country gentlemen.

The results of the minute division of labour, to which so much of the excellence of all that is excellent in London is mainly owing, is in nothing more apparent than in that department of the fine arts which people devoid of taste call fashionable tailoring. We have at the West End fashionable _artistes_ in riding coats, in dress coats, in cut-aways; one is superlative in a Taglioni, another devotes the powers of his mind exclusively to the construction of a Chesterfield, a third gives the best years of his life to the symmetrical beauty of a barrel-trouser; from the united exertions of these, and a thousand other men of taste and genius, is your indisputably-dressed man of fashion turned out upon the town. Then there are constructors of Horse Guards' and of Foot Guards' jacket, full and undress; the man who contrives these would expire if desired to turn his attention to the coat of a marching regiment; a hussar-pelisse-maker despises the hard, heavy style of the cutters for the Royal Artillery, and so on. Volumes would not shut if we were to fill them with the infinite variety of these disguisers of that nakedness which formerly was our shame, but which latterly, it would seem, has become our pride. With the exception of one gentleman citywards, who has achieved an immortality in the article of box-coats, every contriver of men of fashion, we mean in the tailoring, which is the principal department, reside in the parish of St James's, within easy reach of their distinguished patrons. These gentlemen have a high and self-respecting idea of the nobleness and utility of their vocation. A friend of ours, of whom we know no harm save that he pays his tailors' bills, being one day afflicted with this unusual form of insanity, desired the artist to deduct some odd shillings from his bill; in a word, to make it pounds--"Excuse me, sir," said Snip, "but pray, let _us_ not talk of pounds--pounds for tradesmen, if you please; but artists, sir, _artists_ are always remunerated with guineas!"

To return to the outward and visible man of fashion, from whose peculiarities our dissertation upon the sublime and beautiful in tailoring has too long detained us. The same subdued expression of elegance and ease that pervades the leading articles of his attire, extends, without exception, to all the accessories; or if he is deficient in aught, the accessorial _toggery_, such as hats, boots, _choker_, gloves, are always carefully attended to; for it is in this department that so distinguished a member of the detective police as ourselves is always enabled to arrest disguised snobbery. You will never see a man of fashion affect a Paget hat, for example, or a D'Orsayan beaver: the former has a ridiculous exuberance of crown, the latter a by no means allowable latitude of brim--besides, borrowing the fashion of a hat, is with him what plagiarizing the interior furniture of the head is with others. He considers stealing the idea of a hat low and vulgar, and leaves the unworthy theft to be perpetrated by pretenders to fashion: content with a hat that becomes him, he is careful never to be before or behind the prevailing hat-intelligence of the time. Three hats your man of fashion sedulously escheweth--a new hat, a shocking bad hat, and a gossamer. As the song says, "when into a shop he goes" he never "buys a four-and-nine," neither buyeth he a Paris hat, a ventilator, or any of the hats indebted for their glossy texture to the entrails of the silk worm; he sporteth nothing below a two-and-thirty shilling beaver, and putteth it not on his head until his valet, exposing it to a shower of rain, has "taken the shine out of it."

In boots he is even more scrupulously attentive to what Philosopher Square so appropriately called the fitness of things: his boots are never square-toed, or round-toed, like the boots of people who think their toes are in fashion. You see that they fit him, that they are of the best material and make, and suitable to the season: you never see him sport the Sunday patent-leathers of the "snob," who on week-a-days proceeds on eight-and-sixpenny high-lows: you never see him shambling along in boots a world too wide, nor hobbling about a crippled victim to the malevolence of Crispin. The idiosyncrasy of his foot has always been attended to; he has worn well-fitting boots every day of his life, and he walks as if he knew not whether he had boots on or not. As for stocks, saving that he be a military man, he wears them not; they want that easy negligence, attainable only by the graceful folds of a well tied _choker_. You never see a man of fashion with his neck in the pillory, and you hardly ever encounter a Cockney whose cervical investment does not convey at once the idea of that obsolete punishment. A gentleman never considers that his neck was given him to show off a cataract of black satin upon, or as a post whereon to display gold-threaded fabrics, of all the colours of the rainbow: sooner than wear such things, he would willingly resign his neck to the embraces of a halter. His study is to select a modest, unassuming _choker, fine_ if you please, but without pretension as to pattern, and in colour harmonizing with his residual _toggery_: this he ties with an easy, unembarrassed air, so that he can conveniently look about him. Oxford men, we have observed, tie chokers better than any others; but we do not know whether there are exhibitions or scholarships for the encouragement of this laudable faculty. At Cambridge (except Trinity) there is a laxity in chokers, for which it is difficult to account, except upon the principle that men there attend too closely to the mathematics; these, as every body knows, are in their essence inimical to the higher departments of the fine arts. There is no reason, however, why in this important branch of learning, which, as we may say, comes home to the bosom of every man, one Alma Mater should surpass another; since at both the intellects of men are almost exclusively occupied for years in tying their abominable white chokers, so as to look as like tavern waiters as possible.

Another thing: if a gentleman sticks a pin in his choker, you may be sure it has not a head as big as a potatoe, and is not a sort of Siamese Twin pin, connected by a bit of chain, or an imitation precious stone, or Mosaic gold concern. If he wears studs, they are plain, and have cost not less at the least than five guineas the set. Neither does he ever make a High Sheriff of himself, with chains dangling over the front of his waistcoat, or little pistols, seals, or trinketry appearing below his waistband, as much as to say, "_if you only knew what a watch I have inside_!" Nor does he sport trumpery rings upon raw-boned fingers; if he wears rings, you may depend upon it that they are of value, that they are sparingly distributed, and that his hand is not a paw.

A man of fashion never wears Woodstock gloves, or gloves with double stitches, or eighteen-penny imitation French kids: his gloves, like himself and every thing about him, are the real thing. Dressy young men of fashion sport primrose kids in the forenoon; and, although they take care to avoid the appearance of snobbery by never wearing the same pair a second day, yet, after all, primrose kids in the forenoon are not the thing, not in keeping, not quiet enough: we therefore denounce primrose kids, and desire to see no more of them.

If you are unfortunate enough to be acquainted with a snob, you need not put yourself to the unnecessary expense of purchasing an almanac for the ensuing year: your friend the snob will answer that useful purpose completely to your satisfaction. For example, on Thursdays and Sundays he shaves and puts on a clean shirt, which he exhibits as freely as possible in honour of the event: Mondays and Fridays you will know by the vegetating bristles of his chin, and the disappearance of the shirt cuffs and collar. These are replaced on Tuesdays and Saturdays by supplementary collar and cuffs, which, being white and starched, form a pleasing contrast with that portion of the original _chemise_, vainly attempted to be concealed behind the folds of a three-and-six-penny stock. Wednesdays and Fridays you cannot mistake; your friend is then at the dirtiest, and his beard at the longest, anticipating the half-weekly wash and shave: on quarter-day, when he gets his salary, he goes to a sixpenny barber and has his hair cut.

A gentleman, on the contrary, in addition to his other noble inutilities, is useless as an almanac. He is never half shaven nor half shorn: you never can tell when he has had his hair cut, nor has he his clean-shirt days, and his days of foul linen. He is not merely outwardly _propre_, but asperges his cuticle daily with "oriental scrupulosity:" he is always and ever, in person, manner, dress, and deportment, the same, and has never been other than he now appears.

You will say, perhaps, this is all very fine; but give me the money the man of fashion has got, and I will be as much a man of fashion as he: I will wear my clothes with the same ease, and be as free, unembarrassed, _degagé_, as the veriest Bond Street lounger of them all. Friend, thou mayest say so, or even think so, but I defy thee: snobbery, like murder, will out; and, if you do not happen to be a gentleman born, we tell you plainly you will never, by dint of expense in dress, succeed in "topping the part."

We have been for many years deeply engaged in a philosophical enquiry into the origin of the peculiar attributes characteristic of the man of fashion. A work of such importance, however, we cannot think of giving to the world, except in the appropriate envelope of a ponderous quarto: just now, by way of whetting the appetite of expectation, we shall merely observe, that, after much pondering, we have at last discovered the secret of his wearing his garments "with a difference," or, more properly, with an indifference, unattainable by others of the human species. You will conjecture, haply, that it is because he and his father before him have been from childhood accustomed to pay attention to dress, and that habit has given them that air which the occasional dresser can never hope to attain: or that, having the best _artistes_, seconded by that beautiful division of labour of which we have spoken heretofore, he can attain an evenness of costume, an undeviating propriety of toggery--not at all: the whole secret consists in _never paying, nor intending to pay, his tailor_!

Poor devils, who, under the Mosaic dispensation, contract for three suits a-year, the old ones to be returned, and again made new; or those who, struck with more than money madness, go to a tailor, cash in hand, for the purpose of making an investment, are always accustomed to consider a coat as a representative of so much money, transferred only from the pocket to the back. Accordingly, they are continually labouring under the depression of spirits arising from a sense of the possible depreciation of such a valuable property. Visions of showers of rain, and March dust, perpetually haunt their morbid imaginations. Greasy collars, chalky seams, threadbare cuffs, (three warnings that the time must come when that tunic, for which five pounds ten have been lost to them and their heirs for ever, will be worth no more than a couple of shillings to an old-clothesman in Holywell Street,) fill them, as they walk along the Strand, with apprehensions of anticipated expenditure. They walk circumspectly, lest a baker, sweep, or hodman, stumbling against the coat, may deprive its wearer of what to him represents so much ready money. These real and imaginary evils altogether prohibit the proprietor of a paid-up coat wearing it with any degree of graceful indifference.

But when a family of fashion, for generations, have not only never thought of paying a tailor, but have considered taking up bills, which the too confiding snip has discounted for them, as decidedly smacking of the punctilious vulgarity of the tradesman; thus drawing down upon themselves the vengeance of that most intolerant sect of Protestants, the Notaries Public; when a young man of fashion, taught from earliest infancy to regard tailors as a Chancellor of the Exchequer regards the people at large, that is to say, as a class of animals created to be victimized in every possible way, it is astonishing what a subtle grace and indescribable expression are conveyed to coats which are sent home to you for nothing, or, what amounts to exactly the same thing, which you have not the most remote idea of paying for, _in secula seculorum_. So far from caring whether it rains or snows, or whether the dust flies, when you have got on one of these eleemosynary coats, you are rather pleased than otherwise. There is a luxury in the idea that on the morrow you will start fresh game, and victimize your tailor for another. The innate cruelty of the human animal is gratified, and the idea of a tailor's suffering is never conceived by a customer without involuntary cachinnation. Not only is he denied the attribute of integral manhood--which even a man-milliner by courtesy enjoys--but that principle which induces a few men of enthusiastic temperament to pay debts, is always held a fault when applied to the bills of tailors. And, what is a curious and instructive fact in the natural history of London fashionable tailors, and altogether unnoticed by the Rev. Leonard Jenyns, in his _Manual of British Vertebrate Animals_, if you go to one of these gentlemen, requesting him to "execute," and professing your readiness to pay his bill on demand or delivery, he will be sure to give your order to the most scurvy botch in his establishment, put in the worst materials, and treat you altogether as a person utterly unacquainted with the usages of polite society. But if, on the contrary, you are recommended to him by Lord Fly-by-night, of Denman Priory--if you give a thundering order, and, instead of offering to pay for it, pull out a parcel of bill-stamps, and _promise_ fifty per cent for a few hundreds down, you will be surprised to observe what delight will express itself in the radiant countenance of your victim: visions of cent per cent, ghosts of post-obits, dreams of bonds with penalties, and all those various shapes in which security delights to involve the extravagant, rise flatteringly before the inward eye of the man of shreds and patches. By these transactions with the great, he becomes more and more a man, less and less a tailor; instead of cutting patterns and taking measures, he flings the tailoring to his foreman, becoming first Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer to peers of the realm.

With a few more of the less important distinctive peculiarities of the gentleman of fashion, we may dismiss this portion of our subject. A gentleman never affects military air or costume if he is not a military man, and even then avoids professional rigidity and swagger as much as possible; he never sports spurs or a riding-whip, except when he is upon horseback, contrary to the rule observed by his antagonist the snob, who always sports spurs and riding-whip, but who never mounts higher than a threepenny stride on a Hampstead donkey. Nor does a gentleman ever wear a _moustache_, unless he belongs to one of the regiments of hussars, or the household cavalry, who alone are ordered to display that ornamental exuberance. Foreigners, military or non-military, are recognized as wearing hair on the upper lip with propriety, as is the custom of their country. But no gentleman here thinks of such a thing, any more than he would think of sporting the uniform of the Tenth Hussars.

There is an affectation among the vulgar clever, of wearing the _moustache_, which they clip and cut _à la Vandyk_: this is useful, as affording a ready means of distinguishing between a man of talent and an ass--the former, trusting to his head, goes clean shaved, and looks like an Englishman: the latter, whose strength lies altogether in his hair, exhausts the power of Macassar in endeavouring to make himself as like an ourang-outang as possible.

Another thing must be observed by all who would successfully ape the gentleman: never to smoke cigars in the street in mid-day. No better sign can you have than this of a fellow reckless of decency and behaviour: a gentleman smokes, if he smokes at all, where he offends not the olfactories of the passers-by. Nothing, he is aware, approaches more nearly the most offensive personal insult, than to compel ladies and gentlemen to inhale, after you, the ejected fragrance of your penny Cuba or your three-halfpenny mild Havannah.

In the cities of Germany, where the population almost to a man inhale the fumes of tobacco, street smoking is very properly prohibited; for however agreeable may be the sedative influence of the Virginian weed when inspired from your own manufactory, nothing assuredly is more disgusting than inhalation of tobacco smoke at second-hand.

Your undoubted man of fashion, like other animals, has his peculiar _habitat_: you never see him promenading in Regent Street between the hours of three and five in the afternoon, nor by any chance does he venture into the Quadrant: east of Temple Bar he is never seen except on business, and then, never on foot: if he lounges any where, it is in Bond Street, or about the clubs of St James's.

OF PRETENDERS TO FASHION.

"Their conversation was altogether made up of Shakspeare,
taste, high life and the musical glasses."--_Vicar of
Wakefield_.

We will venture to assert, that in the course of these essays on the aristocracies of London life, we have never attempted to induce any of our readers to believe that there was any cause for him to regret, whatever condition of life it had pleased Providence to place him in, or to suppose, for one moment, that reputable men, though in widely different circumstances, are not equally reputable. We have studiously avoided portraying fashionable life according to the vulgar notions, whether depreciatory or panegyrical. We have shown that that class is not to be taken and treated of as an integral quantity, but to be analyzed as a component body, wherein is much sterling ore and no little dross. We have shown by sufficient examples, that whatever in our eyes makes the world of fashion really respectable, is solely owing to the real worth of its respectable members; and on the contrary, whatever contempt we fling upon the fashionable world, is the result of the misconduct of individuals of that order, prominently contemptible.

Of the former, the example is of infinite value to society, in refining its tone, and giving to social life an unembarrassed ease, which, if not true politeness, is its true substitute; and, of the latter, the mischief done to society is enhanced by the multitude of low people ready to imitate their vices, inanities, and follies.

Pretenders to fashion, who hang upon the outskirts of fashionable society, and whose lives are a perpetual but unavailing struggle to jump above their proper position, are horrid nuisances; and they abound, unfortunately, in London.

In a republic, where practical equality is understood and acted upon, this pretension would be intolerable; in an aristocratic state of society, with social gradations pointedly defined and universally recognized, it is merely ridiculous to the lookers-on; to the pretenders, it is a source of much and deserved misery and isolation.

There are ten thousand varying shades and degrees of this pretension, from the truly fashionable people who hanker after the _exclusives_, or seventh heaven of high life, down to the courier out of place, who, in a pot-house, retails Debrett by heart, and talks of lords, and dukes, and earls, as of his particular acquaintance, and how and where he met them when on his travels.

The _exclusives_ are a queer set, some of them not by any means people of the best pretensions to lead the _ton_. Lady L---- and Lady B---- may be very well as patronesses of Almack's; but what do you say to Lady J----, a plebeian, and a licensed dealer in money, keeping her shop by deputy in a lane somewhere behind Cornhill? Almack's, as every body knows who has been there, or who has talked with any observing _habitué_ of the place, contains a great many queer, spurious people, smuggled in somehow by indirect influence, when royal command is not the least effectual: a surprizing number of seedy, poverty-stricken young men, and, in an inverse ratio, women who have any thing more than the clothes they wear: yet, by mere dint of difficulty, by the simple circumstance of making admission to this assembly a matter of closeting, canvassing, balloting, black-balling, and so forth, people of much better fashion than many of the exclusives make it a matter of life and death to have their admission secured. Admission to Almack's is to a young _débutante_ of fashion as great an object as a seat at the Privy Council Board to a flourishing politician: your _ton_ is stamped by it, you are of the exclusive _set_, and, by virtue of belonging to that set, every other is open to you as a matter of course, when you choose to condescend to visit it. The room in which Almack's balls are held we need not describe, because it has been often described before, and because the doorkeeper, any day you choose to go to Duke Street, St James's, will be too happy to show it you for sixpence; but we will give you in his own words, all the information we could contrive to get from a man of the highest fashion, who is a subscriber.

"Why, I really don't know," said he, "that I have any thing to tell you about Almack's, except that all that the novel-writers say about it is ridiculous nonsense: the lights are good, the refreshments not so good, the music excellent; the women dress well, dance a good deal, and talk but little. There is a good deal of envy, jealousy, and criticism of faces, figures, fortunes, and pretensions: one, or at most two, of the balls in a season are pleasant; the others _slow_ and very dull. The point of the thing seems to be, that people of rank choose to like it because it stamps a set, and low people talk about it because they cannot by any possibility know any thing about it."

Such is Almack's, of which volumes have been spun, of most effete and lamentable trash, to gratify the morbid appetites of the pretenders to fashion.

We must not omit to inform our rural readers, that no conventional rank gives any one in London a patent of privilege in truly fashionable society. An old baronet shall be exclusive, when a young peer shall have no fashionable society at all: a lord is by no means necessarily a man in what the fashionable sets call good society: we have many lords who are not men of fashion, and many men of fashion who are not lords.

Professional peers, whether legal, naval, or military, bishops, judges, and all that class of men who attain by talents, interest, and good fortune, or all, or any of these, a lofty social position, have no more to do with the exclusive or merely fashionable sets than you or I. A man may be a barrister in full practice to-day, an attorney-general to-morrow, a chief-justice the day after with a peerage: yet his wife and daughter visit the same people, and are visited by the same people, that associated with them before. If men of fashion know them, it is because they have business to transact or favours to seek for, or because it is part of their system to keep up a qualified intimacy with all whom they think proper to lift to their own level: but this intimacy is only extended by the man of birth to the man of talent. His family do not become people of fashion until the third or fourth generation: he remains the man of business, the useful, working, practical, brains-carrying man that he was; and his family, if they are wise, seek not to become the familiars of the old aristocracy, and if they are foolish, become the most unfortunate pretenders to fashion. They are too near to be pleasant; and the gulf which people of hereditary fashion place between is impassable, even though they flounder up to their necks in servile mud.

It is the same with baronets, M.P.'s, and all that sort of people. These handles to men's names go down very well in the country, where it is imagined that a baronet or an M.P. is, _ex officio_, a man of consequence, and that, rank being equal, consequence is also equal. In London, on the contrary, people laugh at the idea of a man pluming himself upon such distinctions without a difference: in town we have baronets of all sorts--the "Heathcotes, and such large-acred men," Sir Watkyn, and the territorial baronetage: then we have the Hanmers, and others of undoubted fashion, to which their patent is the weakest of their claims: then we have the military, naval, and medical baronet: descending, through infinite gradations, we come down to the tallow-chandling, the gin-spinning, the banking, the pastry-cooking baronetage.

What is there, what can there be, in common with these widely severed classes, save that they equally enjoy _Sir_ at the head and _Bart_. at the tail of their sponsorial and patronymic appellations? Do you think the landed Bart. knows any more of the medical Bart. than that, when he sends for the other to attend his wife, he calls him generally "doctor," and seldom Sir James: or that the military Bart. does not much like the naval Bart.? and do not all these incongruous Barts. shudder at the bare idea of been seen on the same side of the street with a gin-spinning, Patent-British-Genuine-Foreign-Cognac Brandy-making Bart.? and do not each and every one of these Barts. from head to tail, even including the last-mentioned, look down with immeasurable disdain upon the poor Nova Scotia baronets, who move heaven and earth to get permission to wear a string round their necks, and a badge like the learned fraternity of cabmen?