have no manners at all. He must behave with tame and passive
insolence, never breaking into active effrontery excepting
towards unprotected women and clergymen. Persons of no
importance he does not see, and is not conscious of their
existence; those who have the same standing, he treats with
easy scorn, and he acknowledges the distinction of superiors
only by patronizing and protecting them. A man of fashion
does not despise wealth; he cannot but think _that_ valuable
which procures to others the honour of paying for his
suppers.

Fashion is so completely distinguished from good breeding,
that it is even opposed to it. It is in fact a system of
refined vulgarity. What, for example can be more vulgar than
incessantly _talkin_g about forms and customs? About silver
forks and French soup? A gentleman follows these conventional
habits; but he follows them as matters of course. He looks
upon them as the ordinary and essential customs of refined
society. French forks are to him things as indispensable as a
table-cloth; and he thinks it as unnecessary to insist upon
the one as upon the other. If he sees a person who eats with
his knife, he concludes that that person is ignorant of the
usages of the world, but he does not shriek and faint away
like a Bond-street dandy. If he dines at a table where there
are no silver forks, he eats his dinner in perfect propriety
with steel, and exhibits, neither by manner nor by speech,
that he perceives any error. To be sure, he forms his own
opinion about the rank of his entertainer, but he leaves it
to such new-made gentry as Mr. Theodore Hook, in his vulgar
fashionable novels, to harangue about such delinquencies. The