ngling at the heels of
fashionable Christians. These people are "swelling" upon the profits of
the last generation in St Mary Axe or Petticoat Lane. The founders of
their families have been loan-manufacturers, crimps, receivers of stolen
goods, wholesale nigger-dealers, clippers and sweaters, rag-merchants,
and the like, and conscientious Israelites; but their children, not
having fortitude to abide by their condition, nor right principle to
adhere to their sect, come to the west end of the town, and, by right of
their money, make unremitting assaults upon the loose fish of
fashionable society, who laugh at, and heartily despise them, while they
are as ashes in the mouths of the respectable members of the persuasion
to which they originally belonged.

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