The Selector,
AND
LITERARY NOTICES OF
NEW WORKS
THE GREAT WORLD OF FASHION.
Satire is the pantomime of literature, and harlequin's jacket, his black vizor, and his eel-like lubricity, are so many harmless satires on the weak sides of our nature. The pen of the satirist is as effective as the pencil of the artist; and provided it draw well, cannot fail to prove as attractive. Indeed, the characters of pantomime, harlequin, columbine, clown, and pantaloon, make up the best quarto that has ever appeared on the manners and follies of the times; and they may be turned to as grave an account as any page of Seneca's Morals, or Cicero's Disputations; however various the means, the end, or object, is the same, and all is rounded with a sleep.
"The Great World," in the language of satire, is the "glass of fashion and the mould of form." Its geography and history are as perpetually changing as the modes of St. James's, or the features of one of its toasted beauties; and what is written of it to-day may be dry, and its time be out of joint, before it has escaped the murky precincts of the printing-house. It is subtlety itself, and we know not "whence it cometh, and whither it goeth." Its philosophy is concentric, for this Great World consists of thousands of little worlds, usque ad infinitum, and we do well if we become not giddy with looking on the wheels of its vicissitudes.
We know not whom we have to thank for the pamphlet of sixty pages—entitled "A Geographical and Historical Account of the Great World"—now before us. It bears the imprint of "Ridgway, Piccadilly," so that it is published at the gate of the very region it describes—like the accounts of Pere la Chaise, sold at its concierge. Annexed is a Map of the Great World—but the author has not "attempted to lay down the longitude; the only measurements hitherto made being confined to the west of the meridian of St. James's Strait." Then the author tells us of the atomic hypothesis of the formation of the Great World. "These rules, for the performance of what appears to be an atomic quadrille, are furnished by Sir H. Davy, elected by the Great World, master of the ceremonies for the preservation of order, and prescribing rules for the regulation of the Universe." "The surface of the Great World, or rather its crust, has been ascertained to be exceedingly shallow."