, or who has talked with any observing _habitue_
of the place, contains a great many queer, spurious people, smuggled in
somehow by indirect influence, when royal command is not the least
effectual: a surprizing number of seedy, poverty-stricken young men,
and, in an inverse ratio, women who have any thing more than the clothes
they wear: yet, by mere dint of difficulty, by the simple circumstance
of making admission to this assembly a matter of closeting, canvassing,
balloting, black-balling, and so forth, people of much better fashion
than many of the exclusives make it a matter of life and death to have
their admission secured. Admission to Almack's is to a young _debutante_
of fashion as great an object as a seat at the Privy Council Board to a
flourishing politician: your _ton_ is stamped by it, you are of the
exclusive _set_, and, by virtue of belonging to that set, every other is
open to you as a matter of course, when you choose to condescend to
visit it. The room in which Almack's balls are held we need not
describe, because it has been often described before, and because the
doorkeeper, any day you choose to go to Duke Street, St James's, will be
too happy to show it you for sixpence; but we will give you in his own
words, all the information we could contrive to get from a man of the
highest fashion, who is a subscriber.

"Why, I really don't know," said he, "that I have any thing to tell you
about Almack's, except that all that the novel-writers say about it is
ridiculous nonsense: the lights are good, the refreshments not so good,
the music excellent; the women dress well, dance a good deal, and talk
but little. There is a good deal of envy, jealousy, and criticism of
faces, figures, fortunes, and pretensions: one, or at most two, of the
balls in a season are pleasant; the others _slow_ and very dull. The
point of the thing seems to be, that people of rank choose to like it
because it stamps a set, and low people talk about it because they
cannot by any possibility know any thing about it."

Such is Almack's, of which volumes have been spun, of most effete and
lamentable trash, to gratify the morbid appetites of the pretenders to
fashion.

We must not omit to inform our rural readers, that no conventional rank
gives any one in London a patent of privilege in truly fashionable
society. An old baronet shall be exclusive, when a young peer shall have
no fashionable society at all: a lord is by no means neces