yet come from year to year, and
see how permanent that is, in this Boston or New York life of man,
where, too, it has not the lease 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.[409]

9. 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,"[410] 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
cotillions. 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 countryman at a city dinner, bel