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.