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.