HEAVY SWELLS are another very important class of pretenders to fashion, and are divided into civil and military. Professional men, we say it to their honour, seldom affect the heavy swell, because the feeblest glimmerings of that rationality of thinking which results from among the lowest education, preserves them from the folly of the attempt, and, in preserving from folly, saves them from the self-reproaching misery that attends it. Men of education or of common sense, look upon pretension to birth, rank, or any thing else to which they have no legitimate claim, as little more than moral forgery; it is with them an uttering base coin upon false pretences. It is generally the wives and families of professional men who are afflicted with pretension to fashion, of which we shall give abundant examples when we come to treat of gentility-mongers. But the heavy swell, who is of all classes, from the son and heir of an opulent blacking-maker down to the lieutenant of a marching regiment on half-pay, is utterly destitute of brains, deplorably illiterate, and therefore incapable, by nature and bringing-up, of respecting himself by a modest contented demeanour. He is never so unhappy as when he appears the thing he is--never so completely in his element as when acting the thing he is not, nor can ever be. He spends his life in jumping, like a cat, at shadows on the wall. He has day and night dreams of people, who have not the least idea that such a man is in existence, and he comes in time, by mere dint of thinking of nobody else, to think that he is one of them. He acquaints himself with the titles of lords, as other men do those of books, and then boasts largely of the extent of his acquaintance.
Let us suppose that he is an officer of a hard-fighting, foreign-service, neglected infantry regiment. This, which to a soldier would be an honest pride, is the shame of the Heavy Military Swell. His chief business in life, next to knowing the names and faces of lords, is concealing from you the corps to which he has the dishonour, he thinks, to belong. He talks mightily of the service, of hussars and light dragoons; but when he knows that you know better, when you poke him hard about the young or old buffs, or the dirty half-hundred, he whispers in your ear that "my fellows," as he calls them, are very "fast," and that they are "all known in town, very well known indeed"--a piece of information you will construe in the case of the heavy swell to mean, better known than trusted.