PART II.
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.