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 may 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 of agoro, distinguished from the of mono: "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'appui, the springing-ground whence to jump above their condition, where, transformed by the gilded rays of wealth or power, discarding their se

veral 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-fornothing 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 madethe point of extreme depression once be got over: the cares of the daily recurring poor necessities of lifeshelter, 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 botherethj udges, 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 en

forced 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.

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, illustra

tive 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 exclusivesyet, 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 lowborn 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 with out 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 ungentle

manlike, 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 animalculæ, 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 eannot 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 Green wich 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 carica tures 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 dis covered, 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 the 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 calicoprinting 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, pothouse 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