Chapter VII: Part I: Aristocracies of London Life (1)

OF ARISTOCRACIES IN GENERAL.

The cumulative or aggregative property of wealth and power, and in a less degree of knowledge also, make up in time a consolidation of these elements in the hands of particular classes, which, for our present purposes, we choose to term an aristocracy of birth, wealth, knowledge, or power, as the case nay be. The word aristocracy, distinctive of these particular classes, we use in a conventional sense only, and beg leave to protest, _in limine_, against any other acceptation of the term. We use the word, because it is popularly comprehensive; the [Greek: hoi aristoi], distinguished from the [Greek: hoi polloi]: "good men," as is the value of goodness in the city; "the great," as they are understood by penners of fashionable novels; "talented," or "a genius," as we say in the _coteries_; but not a word, mark you, of the abstract value of these signs--their positive significations; good may be bad, great mean, talented or a genius, ignorant or a puppy. We have nothing to do with that; these are thy terms, our Public; thou art responsible for the use made of them. Thou it is who tellest us that the sun rises and sets, (which it does not,) and talkest of the good and great, without knowing whether they are great and good, or no. Our business is to borrow your recognized improprieties of speech, only so far as they will assist us in making ourselves understood.

When Archimedes, or some other gentleman, said that he could unfix the earth had he a point of resistance for his lever, he illustrated, by a hypothesis of physics, the law of the generation of aristocracies. Aristocracies begin by having a leg to stand on, or by getting a finger in the pie. The multitude, on the contrary, never have any thing, because they never _had_ any thing, they want the _point d'oppui_, the springing-ground whence to jump above their condition, where, transformed by the gilded rays of wealth or power, discarding their several skins or sloughs, they sport and flutter, like lesser insects, in the sunny beams of aristocratic life.

Indeed, we have often thought that the transformation of the insect tribes was intended, by a wise Omnipotence, as an illustration (for our own benefit) of the rise and progress of the mere aristocracy of fashionable life.

The first condition of existence of these diminutive creatures, is the egg, or _embryo_ state; this the anxious parent attaches firmly to some leaf or bough, capable of affording sufficient sustenance to the future grub, who, in due course, eats his way through the vegetable kingdom upon which he is quartered, for no merit or exertion of his own; and where his career is only to be noted by the ravages of his insatiable jaws. After a brief period of lethargy or _pupa_ state, this good-for-nothing creature flutters forth, powdered, painted, perfumed, scorning the dirt from which he sprung, and leading a life of uselessness and vanity, until death, in the shape of an autumnal shower, prostrates himself and his finery in the dust.

How beautiful and how complete is the analogy between the insect and his brother butterfly of fashionable life! While yet an _embryo_, a worm, he _grubs_ his way through a good estate, and not a little ready money. Then, after a long sojourn in the _pupa_ or _puppy_ state--longer far than that of any other maggot--he emerges a perfect butterfly, vain, empty, fluttering, and conceited, idling, flirting, flaunting, philandering, until the summer of his _ton_ is past, when he dies, or is arrested, and expiates a life of puerile vanity in Purgatory or the Queen's Bench.

Let the beginning once be made--the point of extreme depression once be got over: the cares of the daily recurring poor necessities of life--shelter, clothing, food, be of no moment: let a man taste, though it were next to nothing, of the delicious luxury of accumulation, let him, with every hoarded shilling, or half-crown, or pound, carry his head higher, smiling in secret at the world and his friends, and the aristocrat of wealth is formed: he is removed for ever from the hand-to-mouth family of man, and thenceforth represents his breeches pocket.

It is the same with the aristocrat of birth: some fortunate accident--some well-aimed and successful stroke of profligacy, or more rarely of virtue, redeems an individual from the common herd: the rays, mayhap, of royal favour fall upon him, and he begins to bloat; his growth is as the growth of the grain of mustard-seed, and in a little while he overshadoweth the land: Noble and Right Honourable are his posterity to the end of time.

There is a poor lad sitting biting his nails till he bites them to the quick, wearing out his heart-strings in constrained silence on the back benches of Westminster Hall: he maketh speeches, eloquent, inwardly, and briefless, mutely bothereth judges, and seduceth innocent juries to his _No_-side: he findeth out mistakes in his learned brethren, and chuckleth secretly therefor: he scratcheth his wig with a pen, and thinketh by what train of circumstantial evidence he may be able to prove a dinner: he laugheth derisively at the income-tax, and the collectors thereof: yet, when he may not have even a "little brown" to fly with, haply, some good angel, in mortal shape of a solicitor, may bestow on him a brief: rushing home to his chambers in the Temple, he mastereth the points of the case, cogitating _pros_ and _cons_: he heareth his own voice in court for the first time: the bottled black-letter of years falleth from his lips, like treacle from a pipkin: he maketh good his points, winneth the verdict and the commendations of the judge: solicitors whisper that there is something in him, and clerks express their conviction that he is a "trump:" the young man eloquent is rewarded in one hour for the toil, rust, and enforced obscurity of years: he is no longer a common soldier of the bar; he steppeth by right divine, forth of the ranks, and becometh a man of mark and likelihood: he is now an aristocrat of the bar--perhaps, a Lyndhurst.

Again, behold the future aristocrat of literary life: to-day regard him in a suit of rusty black, a twice-turned stock, and shirt of Isabella colour, with an affecting hat: in and out of every bookseller's in the Row is he, like a dog in a fair: a brown paper parcel he putteth into your hand, the which, before he openeth, he demands how much cash down you mean to give for it: then, having unfolded the same, giveth you to understand that it is such a work as is not to be seen every day, which you may safely swear to. He journeyeth from the east to the west, from the rising of the sun to the setting thereof, manuscript in hand: from Leadenhall Street, where Minerva has her press, to the street hight Albemarle, which John Murray delighteth to honour, but to no purpose: his name is unknown, and his works are nothing worth. Let him once make a _hit,_ as it is termed, and it is no longer hit or miss with him: he getteth a reputation, and he lieth in bed all day: he shaketh the alphabet in a bag, calling it his last new work, and it goeth through three editions in as many days: he lordeth it over "the trade," and will let nobody have any profit but himself: he turneth up his nose at the man who invites him to a plain dinner, and utterly refuseth evening parties: he holdeth _conversaziones_, where he talks you dead: he driveth a chay, taketh a whole house, sporteth a wife and a minute tiger: in brief, he is now an aristocrat of letters.

The materials for the growth and preservation of these several aristocracies abound in London; and no where on the earth have we the same facilities for the study and investigation of their family likenesses and contrasts, their points of contact and repulsion.

THE ARISTOCRACY OF FASHION.

Approach, reader, but _awful_, as Pope says--approach "with mincing steps and bow profound;" we are about to introduce you to persons of quality.

It is an extraordinary fact, illustrative how far the ignorance of a discerning public will carry those who make a living by practising upon their credulity, that notwithstanding there is an immense number of books annually presented to the do-nothing world, under the curiosity-provoking title of fashionable novels, we have hardly more than one or two generally recognised true and faithful pictures of really fashionable life. The caricatures of caricatures of this Elysian state are numberless--imagination has been exhausted, sense confounded, grammar put on the rack, the "well of English undefiled" stirred up from the very dregs, to give the excluded pictures of the life of the exclusives--yet, what have we? You will excuse us, reader, disturbing the current of our thoughts, by recollecting any of this forty novel-power of inanity, vulgarity, and pertness; but if you take up any of the many volumes in marbled boards, with calf backs, that you will find in cart-loads at the circulating libraries, and look over a page of the fashionable "_lingo_" the Lord Jacob talks to the Lady Suky, or the conversation between Sir Silly Billy and the Honourable Snuffy Duffy; or what the Duke of Dabchick thinks of the Princess Molly; and when you are satisfied, which we take it will be in the course of two pages, if you do not throw down the book, and swear by the Lord Harry--why then, read on and be jolly!

The indescribable absurdities, vices, and follies of the bulk of that class of literature called the fashionable novel, are past the power of catalogue-makers to record; but perhaps overwhelming ignorance of the peculiar class they pretend to describe is not the least conspicuous. Next to lack of knowledge, or sound materials deduced from actual observation, we may place want of taste. There are writers to write the exclusives up, and writers to write them down; one raises our envy, and makes us miserable, because we are not permitted to enter their paradise of social life; another devotes three volumes post octavo, in exemplification of the not altogether forgotten moral fiction of the fox and the sour grapes.

The writers of fashionable novels may be divided, as to their social positions, into the tolerated fashionable novel writers, and the intolerable fashionable novel writers; the first, moving in phases more or less equivocal round their centre and their deity, the exclusive set; the last, desperate from the fact of their total and permanent exclusion from society, but still moving round the outside of the boundary wall, and peeping through chinks in the palings. From the former we have the eulogistic, from the latter the depreciatory fashionable novels; these make us familiar with the celestial attributes of countesses-dowager, and the amiability of their pugs. They are slavering, servile, self-degrading productions, and only serve the exclusives as provocatives to laughter; they are usually written by tutors, ladies who have married tutors, or superannuated governesses, patronized by some charitable member of some distinguished family.

The depreciatory or vilificatory fashionable novel delights in exposing the peccadilloes, or imagined peccadilloes, (for it is all the same,) of young or old people of fashion: a _gourmand_ peer, a titled demirep, a "desperate dandy," a black-leg, and a few such other respectable characters, are dialogued through the customary number of chapters, and conducted to the usual catastrophe: virtue is triumphant, vice abashed, towards the latter end of the last volume; and some low-born hero and heroine, introduced to exhibit, by contrast, the vices of the aristocracy, suddenly, and without any effort of their own, acquire large fortunes, perhaps titles, which it would have been just as easy to have given them at first--go to church in an orthodox manner, and set up a virtuous aristocracy of their own.

We are indebted for this class of fashionable novel to outlaws of both sexes; persons who might have held, but for their own misconduct, respectable positions in society; persons of this sort have the impudence, with their no-characters staring them in the face, to set up as public instructors, and to give us ensamples, drawn from their own perverted imaginations, of a class of which they might have known something, but which it is now past human possibility they can ever know.

These people are not merely not in society--which implies no crime--but they are, notwithstanding their nominal rank or title, _out_ of society, for reasons well and thoroughly known: they are those not merely who cannot come in, but those who, if they did intrude, would be immediately turned out.

Next, ascending from this equivocal class, we have the fashionable novel writers of fashionable life. I do not mean exclusive fashionable life, for there are no writers of these works in that class; but I allude to those who mingle with general fashionable society upon such terms, that if they possessed the talent, they might have supplied with ease the want of which the world complains--that of a just and natural picture of the lives of those forming the Corinthian capital of society in London.

Take, for example, a noble and late viceregal lord and his brother, the Honourable Edmund Phipps. These gentlemen have written fashionable novels, and ought to have written good ones; yet we don't know how it is, but whenever we send to a circulating library to enquire whether they have "YES AND NO," the noes have it; and when we venture to ask for the "FERGUSONS," we find that the three post octavo gentlemen of that title not only do not lodge here or there, but that they don't lodge _any where_.

The fact is, opportunity of observation will do little or nothing without _faculty_ of observation: though the whole social world, old or new, lay bare under the eyes of some men, not one idea could they extract from it; and who, wanting also the descriptive power, still more rare, fail in any attempt to give to the world the results of their experience.

Of this class is the larger number of writers of the better sort, in the line we are talking of: they go into society as they go to galleries, not to copy pictures, but to enjoy them. They enter into the amusements and dissipation of their class, not to look on merely, but to play the game.

In addition to all this, there is a point of honour involved, we think an erroneous one, among persons of quality, as to violating the freemasonry, the signs, ceremonies, and absurdities, of their privacy. Now, this applies only so far as individuals are indicated, and it is so far right. But fashionable classes are fair game, if not shot at sitting; or poached, or snared, or bagged, in any ungentlemanlike, unsportsmanlike fashion. They belong to human character, and human nature; and the reason they have seldom been painted well is, that they have seldom been painted after nature; and any artist will inform you, that whatever is painted to the life, must be painted from the life.

They have not been painted by themselves, because they would have their lives, like the walls that encircle their town houses, impervious to the curious excursive eye; they have not been painted by themselves, because, secondly, the power of depicting graphically what they are in the daily habit of seeing, is not in them, not having been cultivated by study and practice; and thirdly, not being stimulated to literary activity by that Muse of the imperative mood, Necessity, they find more pleasure in having these things brought under their eyes, results of the mental toil and culture of others.

There is a vulgar error uppermost in the minds of some men, which is this: the world of fashion has not hitherto been painted with effect, for the same reason that nobody thinks it worth while to describe a ditch; both being, in the estimation of these persons, stagnant perfumed entities, rich in peculiarly useless vegetation, abounding in vermin and animalculae, and diffusing a contagious effluvia over the surface of society. This error, like many other errors, is an excuse for ignorance, and only shows the innate uncharitableness of some men; they run down, like other sceptics, what they do not know and cannot understand, nor will they believe there can be any good therein; forgetting, knaves and fools as they are, that the aristocratic classes are human beings, with the same intermingled elements of good and ill as themselves, modified by accidental circumstances, which, as the Parliamentary people say, they cannot control, and possessing at least as much of the ordinary good principles and feelings of our common nature, as any other class of our graduated social scale.

Can any thing be more illiberal, more ignorant, more stupid, than for a low man to turn leveller, because he is a low man, and attack, without ceremony and without mercy, people of whom he can by any possibility know no more than the worst side, that is to say, the _outside_: and whom he considers, like the gilt gingerbread he sees in his biennial visit to Greenwich Fair, as vastly fine, but exceedingly unwholesome?

The truth is, fashionable life has been exalted above its just and proper level, and depressed below it, by the slaverers and the vituperaters, solely because they cannot get at it; the former are idolatrous from hope, the latter devilish in despair; and the result we are familiar with, in caricatures portraying this sort of life alternately as a Heaven and a Hell.

The peculiarities of fashionable life are, it is true, few, but they are characteristic, and we now proceed to--

_You_ proceed to--! Now, my good fellow, tell us, will you, how such a person as you, a garreteer, confessing to dining upon the heel of a twopenny loaf and half an onion; making no secret of running up beer scores at public houses, when they will trust you; retailing your nasty scenes of low life, creatures dying in hospitals, work-house funerals, the adventures of street apple-women, and matters and things incomprehensible to genteel families like ourselves living in Russell Square; an outlaw, living from tavern to tavern, from pot-house to pot-house, without name, residence, or station; a mere fellow, subsisting on the misplaced indulgence of an undiscerning public, and one who, if gentlemen and ladies (like ourselves) would only condescend to write, would find his appropriate circle in a work-house, unless he escaped it by dying in an hospital. _You_ proceed to----! What, in the name of gentility, can _you_ know of fashionable life?

Sir, or madam, have mercy, or at least have manners. How astonished you will be--we say, how astonished you _will_ be--if in the fulness of time our title shall dignify the title-page; when it might appear, that by the pen of a peer these papers were made apparent; when, instead of the sort of person you have chosen to imagine your caterer for the good things of fashionable life in London, you may discern to your dismay that a lord--a real lord, alive and kicking, has made a Bude-light of himself, illuminating the shadows of your ignorance: you may read a preparatory memoir, informing you how these ideas of ours were collected in a coach and four, and transmitted to paper in a study overlooking the Green Park; with paper velvet-like, and golden pen ruby-headed, upon rose-wood desk inlaid with ivory, you may find that these essays have been transcribed: you will grovel, you will slaver, you will rub your nose in the pebbles, like a salmon at spawning-time, when this very immortal work shall come out, clothed in purple morocco, our arms emblazoned on the covers, and coroneted on the back, after the manner of publication of the works of royal and noble authors. Then, what running to Debrett for our genealogy, our connexions, our _set_, and all that customary inquisition of the affairs of the great which makes the delight of the little: the "Book of Beauty," and "Pictures of the Nobility," will be ransacked, of course, for verses by our lordship, or portraits of our lordship's ladyship, or of the ladies Exquisitina or Nonsuchina, daughters of our lordship, with slavering verses by intolerable poets; then it will be discovered, and the discovery duly recorded, that our lordship's eldest son, Viscount Ne'er-do-weel, and the Honourable Mr Nogo, are pursuing cricket and pie-crust (commonly called their _studies_) at Eton or Harrow, but are expected at our lordship's seat in Some-Shire for their holidays: then we will be proposed, seconded, and elected, like other noblemen equally undistinguished in the world of science, a fellow of the Royal Society and a fellow of the Society of Arts--and for the same good reason, because we may be a lord; and you, and all the world, will say it was very proper that I should have been elected, though knowing no more of science than that acoustics (if we mistake not) means a pump; or of arts, than that calico-printing and letterpress printing are, somehow or other, not exactly one and the same thing.

Then, sir, we shall hear no more of the bread and cheese and onions, pot-house scores, and low company, with which you have so unceremoniously taxed our lordship. You will drive your jumped-up coach, with your awkward wives and dowdy daughters, and your tawdry liveries, all the way from Russell Square to the Green Park, to catch the chance of a glimpse of our lordship. You find out from our lordship's footman that our lordship wears a particular collar to his coat, and you will move heaven and earth to find out our lordship's tailor. When you apply to him to make a coat in our lordship's style, our tailor, who sees at a glance that you are not fit to be his customer, will tell you with an air, that he "declines to execute."

You will discover, from the same authority, that our lordship smokes a particular tobacco, to be had only at a particular shop; and forthwith even real Havannah stinks in your nostrils, and you apply to Pontet. Pontet gives you a tobacco, (_not_ our tobacco,) and you go away in the innocent consciousness of smoking the exclusive weed of a man of fashion.

Prithee, fool, mind thy own business, and stick to thy shop or thy station, whatever it may be; to which while thou stickest, thou must be respectable, but which when thou wouldst quit, desperately to seize the hem of our lordship's garment, thou becomest the laughing-stock of us and of our class, and we cannot choose but despise thee thoroughly.

When we look at the shelves of a circulating library, groaning beneath that generally despicable class of volumes called fashionable novels, when we take up, only to lay down in disgust, "NOTORIETY, OR FASHIONABLES UNVEILED," "PAVILION, OR A MONTH AT BRIGHTON," "MEMOIRS OF A PEERESS," "MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE," "ALMACK S REVISITED," or some such stuff, we cannot but infer, that it is not the vices or absurdities of what is ignorantly called fashionable life that creates this never-ceasing demand for trash and nonsense, but rather a morbid appetite for vapidity and small-talk, a lady's-maid's curiosity of the secrets of her betters, a servile love of imitating what is unworthy imitation, and of following that which is not worth following, simply because it is supposed that these ridiculous caricatures represent the real life of

"The twice ten thousand for whom earth was made,"

When we recollect, to our shame, that not only these swarms of trashy volumes, which penetrate even into the back-slums, and may be seen unfolded in the paper-patched windows of eighteen-penny milliners in the lowest quarters of our metropolis, find a never-failing succession of ravenous readers, but that newspapers--Sunday newspapers, forsooth--devoted to smutty epigrams, low abuse, vile insinuations, and openly indecent allusion to the connexions, habits of life, and even personal appearance, of fashionable and _pseudo_-fashionable people, receive a disgraceful and dangerous support; we must come to the conclusion, that in this, as in all other merchandize, the demand creates the supply, and that it is among the lower orders of the middle classes that these caricaturers by profession of the upper, their slanderers and their eulogists, find sympathy and encouragement.

There is a sort of "hero-worship," as Mr Carlyle would term it, attaching to the most absurd, ridiculous, and even vicious doings of people who _might be_ fashionable; a counter-jumper, barber's clerk, medical student, or tailor's apprentice, adores the memory of that great man whom we are happy to be able to style the _late_ "markis." The _pave_ of the Haymarket he considers classic ground, and the "Waterford Arms" a most select wine-bibbing establishment. If he does not break a dozen bells or wrench three or four brace of knockers in the season, this penny-cigar-smoking creature hardly thinks he attains to his fractional proportion of humanity.

This may be relied on, that the great inducement of young scapegraces of fashion to the committal of their diurnal and nocturnal outrages upon propriety, is the mischievous gratification they derive from the awkward imitation of their inferiors; and the most effectual method of bringing these aristocratic pranks into disrepute, will be, to treat them as merely vulgar outrages, and punish the perpetrators accordingly.

If, indeed, the small-fry of society would set themselves to imitate all that is worthy imitation in the better sort of their betters, following good examples instead of bad, it would be something to talk of. But since it is not to be expected that they will pursue virtue, piety, good sense, and good breeding for their own sakes, and as these attributes, when they exist in fashionable life--and they _do_ exist among the most fashionable of fashionable people--are in their nature retiring and unobtrusive, while all that is bad in good society is pushed into notoriety, for the example of the mob, we must take pains to point out at some length the difference between really "good society" and what is vulgarly called good society; that is, in fact, the difference between good and bad, and to mark the distinguishing characteristics of the truly fashionable and the vulgarly fashionable man, as wide and deep as is the gulf between a gent and a gentleman.

If the fashionable world be truly represented, as it is not, in the swarms of so-called fashionable novels, gleaned from the sloppy conversation of footmen's ordinaries, or the retail tittle-tattle of lady's-maids in waiting at the registry-offices, how little is it to the credit of the mass of the reading public that they peruse such stuff; or would it be perused at all, but for that vulgar love, so prevalent about town, of imitation of the Lady Fannys and Lady Mary Dollymops, their _nonchalance_, their insipidity, their studied ease, and their affectation of being unaffected?

We therefore desire, before we begin, that our young lady readers, our jury of maidens, will do us the favour to dismiss from their recollection all that they may have heard and read of the fashionable world; that they will not believe the exclusives to be as dull as so many bottles of stale small-beer, or as lively as Seltzer water from the spring, with a dash of brandy in it; that they will forget that there is, in fashionable life, any thing worthy their imitation or adoption, unless it should otherwise appear by the evidence; and that they will not once take up a professedly fashionable novel till they have carefully studied and slept upon what we are going to say.

The word "world" is a comprehensive term, and should be taken in all its relations with great latitude, whether with adjectives or without. For example, the "fashionable world" is far from being an integral quantity, or capable of being reasoned upon as if it were as definite in its relations and proportions as an equilateral triangle. It contains within itself a complete gradation from fashionable excellence to fashionable villany; from fashionable virtue to fashionable vice; fashionable ladies and gentlemen, fashionable pimps, demireps, and profligates. It must be individualized if we wish to treat it fairly, as judges try prisoners severally, not in a lump. But our impressions of the fashionable world, as a class, must be taken from the general preponderating characteristics of good or evil of the whole.

Hast ever been, reader, to Bartlemy fair? If you have, you may have seen--nay, you _must_ have seen--Richardson's immortal show. You must have seen a tall platform in front of the migratory edifice, and on that platform you must have delighted your visual orb with the clown, the pantaloon, the harlequin, the dancing ladies, the walking dandy, the king with his crown, the queen in her rabbit-skin robes, the smock-frocked countryman, the top-booted jockey, and all the _dramatis personae_ of the performance that every moment of every day, during every fair, is for ever "going to begin." You may hardly have observed, sliding quietly through all this tinselled and spangled poverty, a plain carpenter-like man, in a decent suit, who looks as if he had never seen a performance in the whole course of his life, and as if he never cared to see one. This man is, or rather was, the late Mr Richardson, who died worth thirty thousand pounds, and all the clowns, harlequins, pantaloons, dancing ladies, walking dandies, kings with their crowns, and queens in their rabbit-skins, and the rest, are poor pinch-bellied devils, caricaturing humanity for some twelve or fourteen shillings a-week, finding their own paint and frippery. Now, whenever you wish to form a correct idea of the two great classes of fashionable life, call to your remembrance the gentlemen who, like the late lamented Mr Richardson, are proprietors of shows, and the berouged, bedraggled creatures who exhibit on the platform outside for their living.

To be sure, there may be a little difference in names. The proprietors of the show may be dukes, and earls, and marquisses, and so forth. The mountebanks outside may be called counts, chevaliers, knights of the order of the golden fleece, or of the thimble, or of Malta. But the realities are the same. Fashionable life is a show, truly fashionable people are the proprietors, who are never prominently or ridiculously seen therein; and these several orders of over dressed, under-fed, empty-pocketed mountebanks, are the people put on the platform outside, to astonish the eyes and ears of the groundlings.

The _physique_ of the true fashionable is peculiar and characteristic. From the toe of his boot to the crown of his hat, there is that unostentatious, undefinable something about him distinctive of his social position. Professional men, every body knows, have an expression common to their profession. A purblind cyclops could never mistake the expression of an Independent preacher, an universal free-black-nigger Baptist minister, or a Jesuit. Every body knows an infantry officer, with his "eyes right" physiognomy, his odious black-stock, and his habit of treading on his heels, and can distinguish him from the cavalry man, straddling like a gander at a pond side. Your medical doctor has an obsequious, mealy-mouthed, hope-I-see-you-better face, and carries his hands as if he had just taken his fingers from a poultice; while your lawyer is recognised at once by his perking, conceited, cross-examination phiz, the exact counterpart to the expression of an over-indulged jackdaw.

The gentleman of fashion has nothing in common with the professional gentleman, or any other. He stands alone, "like Adam's recollection of his fall." He has an air, it is true, but his air is not a breeze, like the air of a pretender to fashion. The air of the man of fashion is a zephyr.

The expression of the man of fashion is the more difficult to reduce to words, in that it is mostly negative. It is easier to say what this expression is not, than what it is. We can only say, that there is nothing professionally distinctive about it. It is the expression of a man perfectly at ease in his position, and so well aware that he is so, that he does not _seem_ to be aware of it. An absence of all straining after effect; a solicitude rather to avoid than to court observation. If there is any thing positively indicative in his expression, by which I include his manner, it is that of a good-humoured indifference, an inoffensive, unobtrusive stoicism. He would seem to have adopted the excellent advice given by the Apostle to the Thessalonians--"STUDY TO BE QUIET." This is his rule of life, and he acts upon it upon great and small occasions. He only desires that you will have the goodness to let him alone. If he is cheated by a man of his own _set_, (for he knows that he is cheated, as a matter of course, by tradespeople,) he _cuts_ the fellow coolly. If he is insulted, he coolly calls out his man. He falls in love with coolness, marries coolly, and leads a cool connubial life. Whether he wins or loses, whatever happens to disturb the world or himself, he takes coolly, and if he has an aspiration on earth, it is that he may be cool and comfortable.

His philosophy is the mingled Stoical and Epicurean. With him life is a trifle to be gracefully played with--a "froward child, to be humoured till it falls asleep, and all is over." His indifference is imputed to him as a crime; but it should not be forgotten that, if there be any fault at all in this indifference, it is the fault of his position. Fortune is to blame, not he, for setting up a man with no other enemy than time, and no other business than amusement. We do not say that this is the true end of life; we do not enter into the enquiry, which might carry us to leeward of our subject, whether men who have the means of enjoying life, do not show the truest wisdom in pursuing enjoyment. We only know that most men similarly circumstanced would act similarly; and whether there is most vice or greatest misery in the idleness of fashionable life, or in the business of the busy world, _as it is carried on in our time_, I leave to those who have experience and leisure to determine.

Those who wish to study the subject further, may read at their leisure the pleasant paper in which an agreeable writer, Fontenelle, describes Aristotle and Anacreon contending for the prize of wisdom; and may decide with the essayist, giving the prize to the generous old toper of Scios, as we should have done, or to the beetlebrowed Reviewer, according to their humour.

The constitutional and habitual indifference of the man of fashion is generally supposed by those who do not know it, to be an effect of pride; but it is, generally speaking, a symptom of something more akin to humility--of timidity, in short. It is part of his system to avoid contact, save with his fellows; and with those who are not his fellows, or of his _set_, he is altogether out of his element. Therefore, as he is afraid of giving, and incapable of taking offence, he entrenches himself in the unstudied reserve which he finds by experience renders his individuality least assailable, exactly as he surrounds his ornamental woods, his shrubberies, and his parterres with fences, not the less strong because they are invisible.

With adventurers, people who are treading upon his kibes, equivocal pretenders who are galling his heel, he is hopelessly exclusive, preserving towards them an armed neutrality. His friendship is extended to his equals, and to his equals alone: with these his intercourse is free and unrestrained. These alone see the English man of fashion as he really exists, denuded of that armour of reserve with which he goes clothed _cap-a-pie_ in public. Towards others he is distantly polite; and with such nice tact does he blend a distant manner with politeness, that you cannot carp at the former, or catch at the latter. He lets you see that you cannot be _one of them_, but in such a way that you may not quarrel with the manner in which he conveys his intimation.

With his inferior he will not be intimate, nor towards him will he be "proudly condescending." He declines to forget himself so far as for a moment to put you on a level with him; but he will not (as _you_ too often do) degrade you by sinking you below your own level. He holds the even tenor of his way whether you trot, spaniel-like, at his heels or no; nor will he once turn round to bestow upon you either cuffs or caresses.

Although by leisure, education, and intelligence, he is qualified to converse with men of genius, he prefers conversing with them through the medium of their works. He is aware that the days of subscriptions, and "striking for dedications," are past and gone, and that the public have taken the place of the patron. He knows that the habits, employments, and in most instances the circumstances, of intellectual men preclude their mingling familiarly in fashionable circles, on equal terms, and that upon no other terms will they consent to be met. He neither patronizes nor neglects them, but is content to stand in the relation towards them of one of the reading public.

His indifference to the fate and fortunes of deserving men has been, among the vulgar, a common imputation upon the man of fashion, of which class most frequently is the man of power. He is accused of lavishing his favours only upon the toady and the tuft-hunter, and leaving men of independent mind to the caprice of fortune.

This complaint comes with a very bad grace from men who would be thought independent. The man who wants the patronage of the great, must go in search of it, whether he call himself independent or no. Men in power are accustomed to be met more than half way; and the independent man, whether he have merit or no, who expects people of rank to come in search of him, and to hunt him out of the obscurity of his garret, will find himself very much mistaken.

None are truly independent while in pursuit of objects which are attainable only by the pleasure of another. The truly independent are those who not only do not solicit favours, but those who do not want them: and there is seen too often, among needy and struggling men of merit, an irritable pride, a "_fierte_," arising not from a sense of independence, but a consciousness of neglect; and many men boast of the pleasure of an independent life, as many ladies exalt the delights of single blessedness, only because they have never had the offer of changing their condition.

It is quite as unfair, too, to accuse people of condition of bestowing all their favours upon toadies, tuft-hunters, and bear-leaders. The truth is, as they are not in the habit of going into the highways to lookout for persons whereupon to confer obligations, they are obliged to take up with such as offer themselves to their notice. While the man of independence is dreaming away his existence over books and papers in his closet, and cursing the barbarism of the age that does not take him by the hand, and set him up in high places, the man of the world is pushing his fortune in a worldly way, and is content not to talk of independence until he has secured it. The hard words, tuft-hunter, toady, and so forth, are applied, it may be, oftener than they are deserved: led-captain is a term of frequent reproach, but it must always be considered that that sort of talent will be chiefly noticed and rewarded which is in demand in certain circles; fashionable people desire neither to be deafened with wit, nor bewildered with philosophy, nor oppressed with learning; their business, to which they have been brought up, is to glide smoothly through life, and their patronage is chiefly extended to those who offer to relieve them of its petty cares and small annoyances, which men of solid and sterling merit are not able, and, if they were able, are not willing to do.

A wealthy cit has as little regard for men of letters as a fashionable, nor has he the same tact of concealing his indifference; the well-bred man of fashion, who is alone truly the man of fashion, studies _tact_ above all things, and his tact prevents him ever regarding men of mind with any thing approaching contempt.

His friendly offices, which his equals never require, he generally bestows upon men whose position in society is marked and permanent, and who never can by any possibility compete with him; to these, if they be _safe_--that is, if they keep quiet, and are content to enjoy a sort of unpretending familiarity, without boasting or pluming themselves upon their position, he does the kindest and most liberal things, in the kindest and most liberal way; in a way that no other man than one truly fashionable can accomplish. He confers benefits with an affable and disinterested air, which, while it increases the burden of obligation, seems to demand no acknowledgement; he bestows without seeming to know that he is bestowing, and knowing enough of human nature to be aware that to the deserving, obligations have something humiliating, he wishes to make the burden as light as possible.

One of the most amiable qualities about the aristocracy is their liberality and kindness to their dependents; you seldom or never hear any one who has served them faithfully and long having reason to complain. To do something for these people is part of their system, and not to see them neglected or in want, a point of honour. This kindly feeling they extend, as far as their power or influence extends--to humble friends, electioneering partizans, poor connexions. They are always kind and considerate, provided only these persons possess that unpresuming quietude of manner, which makes up a considerable part of that character they delight in, and which they call _safe_. If you introduce to one of these people of fashion, any man who may have an object in view, the first enquiry is, what are his claims--that is, what equivalent has he given, or can he give, for the favours he expects? for it is with the high, as with the low world, nothing for nothing; and secondly, you must be prepared to answer for his _safety_, so that, whatever may be said or done, nothing may, by any possibility, leak out of the _protege_. This accounts for so many perfumed, be-wigged, purblind, silky fellows being taken in and "done for" by the great; and although these fellows dress like fools, and look like fools, depend on't, they are not the fools you take them for: they are aware, that nothing so effectually throws off their guard and disarms the great, as a well-carried affectation of gentlemanly effeminacy, and "a still small voice, like a woman's." We happen to know that some of these people, for this very delicacy of air and manner picked out of the dirt, and carried into high places, who are _au naturel_, as we may say, when they go home, and have laid aside the wigs, silk waistcoats, quizzing-glasses, and the rest of their disguise, as honest, friendly, and unaffected fellows, as are in the world--only they do not desire that any body should say so.

Of a man with a stiff back, black beard, short hair, loud voice, and buff waistcoat, people of fashion, on the contrary, stand in continual awe; his tongue is to them a rattlesnake's tail wagging only as a signal for them to get out of his way; they quiver like an aspen at the sound of his voice, and for their own particular, would rather hear the sharpening of a saw: if such a one courts their acquaintance, they are hopelessly, despairingly polite; if, as is usual, he then waxes insolent, and, as the fast fellows would call it, _slangs_ them, they are delighted with the opportunity of displaying that placid indifference upon which they pride themselves as one of their exclusive accomplishments.

Another peculiarity of truly fashionable people is, that they never say or do spiteful, or vindictive things; revenge and spite they consider _low_, plebeian, and vulgar; besides, vindictiveness of any kind disturbs their equanimity, puts them out of their way, and levels them with the people who may have injured or annoyed them; they cannot endure jaundice of body or mind, and equally abhor any thing that sticks either in the gall, bladder, or "gizzard." Their defensive armour, than which none can be less penetrable, is equanimity; their weapons, unstudied indifference and dignified neglect.

Towards their own "order," they are invariably consistent in kindness and consideration; they stand by, and stand to, one another with a paternal amity, which is only _outwardly_ disturbed by politics; embarrassment or necessity effaces conventional distinctions of politics, and Whig or Tory is always ready to provide for "honest Jack," or "do something" for "poor Fred." But we are not to consider their exertions in this way, accompanied with any self-sacrifice or self-denial; holding in their own hands the means of providing for their friends or relatives, they usually so contrive matters that they lose nothing by it.

To the peculiar quietude of manner, and characteristic gentleness of persons of fashion, in their intercourse with each other, we have many concurring testimonies of impartial observers: of these, the most just at once, and eloquent, that we remember to have read, is that contained in an ever-memorable letter from a Mr Tomkins to a Mrs Jenkins, attributed (with what justice, deponent knoweth not) to a noble and learned lord, supreme in natural theology and excitability, remarkable for versatile nose and talents, and distinguished for chequered fortunes, and "inexpressibles" to match. This learned lord, or Tomkins aforesaid, or whoever may have been the inditer of the epistle _ad_ Jenkins, is eloquent exceedingly upon the _narcotine_ of fashionable life: declares that its soothing influences were unequalled by vapour of purest mundungus, or acetate of morphia, or even pill of opium, blended intimately with glass of _eau-de-vie_. Tomkins is quite right: no man, admitted by whatever door, or ascending by whatever staircase, to the _salons_ of the great, fails to be impressed with the idea that there exists among what the _Post_ calls the "gay and fastidious _habitues_" of the place, every disposition to place him perfectly at his ease: and, if he cannot be at ease, the fault is in him, not in his entertainers. To a great _nisi prius_ lawyer, accustomed during a long life to the discrimination of character in the way of his profession, such a contrast as is presented by the repose and unobtrusive _politesse_ of high life, compared with the _brusquerie_ of the world below, must have been doubly delightful; and we are glad to have upon record the just and eloquent testimony to its existence and social value from so eloquent a pen.

The world without is apt to confound reserve and distance among the great, with pride and insensibility: even those who, admitted by sufferance to fashionable circles, behold the peculiar charm of high life through a wintry atmosphere: the free and unrestrained converse of men of fashion with their equals, none but themselves can know, and none but themselves describe.

Their habit of living, among themselves, is generally simple, and devoid of extravagance or ostentation: they have the best of every thing it is true, but then they have all the advantages of unbounded competition. and unlimited credit: they pay when they think proper, but no tradesman ever dares venture to ask them for money: such as have the bad taste to "dun" are "done:" the patient and long-suffering find their money "after many days." Their amusements among themselves are inexpensive, almost to meanness: the subscription to Almacks, that paradise of exclusives, and envy of the excluded, amounts to not more than half a-guinea a ball, if so much: a stall at the opera costs a young man of fashion, for the season, forty, fifty, or sixty pounds, according to position: for this he is entitled to an ivory ticket, which, when he does not feel inclined to go himself, he can transfer for the evening to another. If he have the misfortune to be a younger brother, many little windfalls come to his share, the results of his relationship. He has an apartment at his elder brother's town-house, or he resides with the dowager, or with a maiden aunt; somebody keeps his cab horse, and some other body keeps the saddle-horse that Lady Mary or Jack Somebody gave him; his "tiger" has the run of all his friends' kitchens as a matter of course, and, as a matter of course, himself has two or three invitations a-day during the season; though, like other poor men, he prefers dining independently at his club. He is on very good terms with the "girls" of his _set_, and is allowed a little innocent flirtation, because he is known to have _tact_ enough not to compromise himself or them by falling in love, or paying "ridiculous" addresses: although a little "fast" perhaps, he is perfectly _safe_, and is on good terms with every body except his eldest brother: he is the idol of countesses-dowager, who hand him a few hundreds whenever he is short, pay his debts for him--give him good advice, and call him "Freddy dear:" in short, although he has nothing, excepting his boot-hooks, that he can possibly call his own, he is a merry, good-natured, honest, harmless fellow, a favourite with every body, and envied for his light-heartedness even by his more fortunate elder brother.

In a book published some five-and-thirty years ago, is an account of the then prevailing method of killing a fashionable day: as the pursuit of inanity and folly has a tedious sameness about it, this picture will answer, with a few variations, for the man of fashion of to-day.

"About twelve, he (the man of fashion) rises, lolls upon a sofa, skims the newspaper, and curses its stupidity. He is particularly angry if he does not find in it a paragraph which he sent to the agent of a fashionable newspaper, generally the _Morning Post_, who lives by procuring such sort of intelligence, containing an account of his having dined at some titled man's table the day before, with whom, if he has no rank himself, he is particularly anxious to mingle. After swallowing several cups of tea and cocoa, and slices of foreign sausages and fowls, he assumes his riding coat, and sallies out to his stables to inspect his horses, and chat with his coachman and grooms.

"Having finished this review and audience, he orders his curricle, and, followed by a couple of grooms, he dashes through most of the principal streets, and calls upon the most celebrated coach and harness makers; at the latter he is shown several new bits for his approbation. He then proceeds to his breeches-maker, thence to Tattersall's, where he is sure to meet a great number of friends, with whom he kills another hour discussing the merits of the different animals he meets with there. These important duties being done, he strolls to an exhibition, or to a print-shop, and looks over a portfolio of caricatures; thence he keeps on moving to a fashionable hotel, to take white spruce beer(!) and sandwiches; here, after arranging his parties for the evening, be returns home to dress. After looking over the cards which have been left for him, he proceeds to his _toilette_ with his valet, and is dressed about seven, when his chariot is at the door, and he drives either to some family to dinner, or to the hotel he visited in the morning, when he perhaps formed a party of four. At ten o'clock he enters the Opera, and like a butterfly moves from box to box; thence behind the scenes; after which he proceeds to one or two routs, or some fashionable gaming-house, and about four is in bed, to recruit himself for a repetition of the same course the next day.

"These loungers have a phraseology peculiar to themselves. A short time since, if one of them was asked how he was, the answer would have been, 'we are in _force_ to-day;' if his wife was enquired after, 'she is in high preservation;' if asked how often he had been at the opera, 'it is my _second_ opera.' They also say, perhaps, speaking of some illustrious hero, 'he's a fine brave fellow, but he ties his handkerchief most shockingly.' I also remember being one day in Hyde Park, when a gentleman rode up to one of these loungers, and after exchanging salutations, the former said to the latter, I wish much to have the pleasure of seeing you--are you engaged next Wednesday? Upon which the other turned round to a little half starved groom, and said, 'John, am I engaged next Wednesday?'