permanent that is, in this Boston or New York life
of man, where too it has not the least countenance from the law of the
land. Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more impassable line. Here
are associations whose ties go over and under and through it, a
meeting of merchants, a military corps, a college class, a fire-club,
a professional association, a political, a religious convention;--the
persons seem to draw inseparably near; yet, that assembly once
dispersed, its members will not in the year meet again. Each returns to
his degree in the scale of good society, porcelain remains porcelain,
and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or fashion
may be objectless, but the nature of this union and selection can
be neither frivolous nor accidental. Each man's rank in that perfect
graduation depends on some symmetry in his structure or some
agreement in his structure to the symmetry of society. Its doors
unbar instantaneously to a natural claim of their own kind. A natural
gentleman finds his way in, and will keep the oldest patrician out who
has lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion understands itself; good-breeding
and personal superiority of whatever country readily fraternize with
those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished
themselves in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure.

To say what good of fashion we can, it rests on reality, and hates
nothing so much as pretenders; to exclude and mystify pretenders and
send them into everlasting 'Coventry,' is its delight. We contemn in
turn every other gift of men of the world; but the habit even in little
and the least matters of not appealing to any but our own sense of
propriety, constitutes the foundation of all chivalry. There is almost
no kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and proportioned, which fashion
does not occasionally adopt and give it the freedom of its saloons. A
sainted soul is always elegant, and, if it will, passes unchallenged
into the most guarded ring. But so will Jock the teamster pass, in some
crisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as long as his head is
not giddy with the new circumstance, and the iron shoes do not wish to
dance in waltzes and cotillons. For there is nothing settled in manners,
but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual. The
maiden at her first ball, the country-man at a city dinner, believes
that there is a ritual according to which every act and compli