To return to the outward and visible man of fashion, from whose peculiarities our dissertation upon the sublime and beautiful in tailoring has too long detained us. The same subdued expression of elegance and ease that pervades the leading articles of his attire, extends, without exception, to all the accessories; or if he is deficient in aught, the accessorial _toggery_, such as hats, boots, _choker_, gloves, are always carefully attended to; for it is in this department that so distinguished a member of the detective police as ourselves is always enabled to arrest disguised snobbery. You will never see a man of fashion affect a Paget hat, for example, or a D'Orsayan beaver: the former has a ridiculous exuberance of crown, the latter a by no means allowable latitude of brim--besides, borrowing the fashion of a hat, is with him what plagiarizing the interior furniture of the head is with others. He considers stealing the idea of a hat low and vulgar, and leaves the unworthy theft to be perpetrated by pretenders to fashion: content with a hat that becomes him, he is careful never to be before or behind the prevailing hat-intelligence of the time. Three hats your man of fashion sedulously escheweth--a new hat, a shocking bad hat, and a gossamer. As the song says, "when into a shop he goes" he never "buys a four-and-nine," neither buyeth he a Paris hat, a ventilator, or any of the hats indebted for their glossy texture to the entrails of the silk worm; he sporteth nothing below a two-and-thirty shilling beaver, and putteth it not on his head until his valet, exposing it to a shower of rain, has "taken the shine out of it."
In boots he is even more scrupulously attentive to what Philosopher Square so appropriately called the fitness of things: his boots are never square-toed, or round-toed, like the boots of people who think their toes are in fashion. You see that they fit him, that they are of the best material and make, and suitable to the season: you never see him sport the Sunday patent-leathers of the "snob," who on week-a-days proceeds on eight-and-sixpenny high-lows: you never see him shambling along in boots a world too wide, nor hobbling about a crippled victim to the malevolence of Crispin. The idiosyncrasy of his foot has always been attended to; he has worn well-fitting boots every day of his life, and he walks as if he knew not whether he had boots on or not. As for stocks, saving that he be a military man, he wears them not; they want that easy negligence, attainable only by the graceful folds of a well tied _choker_. You never see a man of fashion with his neck in the pillory, and you hardly ever encounter a Cockney whose cervical investment does not convey at once the idea of that obsolete punishment. A gentleman never considers that his neck was given him to show off a cataract of black satin upon, or as a post whereon to display gold-threaded fabrics, of all the colours of the rainbow: sooner than wear such things, he would willingly resign his neck to the embraces of a halter. His study is to select a modest, unassuming _choker, fine_ if you please, but without pretension as to pattern, and in colour harmonizing with his residual _toggery_: this he ties with an easy, unembarrassed air, so that he can conveniently look about him. Oxford men, we have observed, tie chokers better than any others; but we do not know whether there are exhibitions or scholarships for the encouragement of this laudable faculty. At Cambridge (except Trinity) there is a laxity in chokers, for which it is difficult to account, except upon the principle that men there attend too closely to the mathematics; these, as every body knows, are in their essence inimical to the higher departments of the fine arts. There is no reason, however, why in this important branch of learning, which, as we may say, comes home to the bosom of every man, one Alma Mater should surpass another; since at both the intellects of men are almost exclusively occupied for years in tying their abominable white chokers, so as to look as like tavern waiters as possible.