The HEAVY SWELL was recorded in our last for the admiration and
instruction of remote ages. When the nineteenth century shall be long
out of date, and centuries in general out of their _teens_, posterity
will revert to our delineation of the heavy swell with pleasure
undiminished, through the long succession of ages yet to come; the
macaroni, the fop, the dandy, will be forgotten, or remembered only in
our graphic portraiture of the heavy swell. But the heavy swell is,
after all, a harmless nobody. His curse, his besetting sin, his
_monomania_, is vanity tinctured with pride: his weak point can hardly
be called a crime, since it affects and injures nobody but himself, if,
indeed, it can be said to injure him who glories in his vocation--who is
the echo of a sound, the shadow of a shade.
The GENTILITY-MONGERS, on the contrary, are positively noxious to
society, as well particular as general. There is a twofold or threefold
iniquity in their goings-on; they sin against society, their families,
and themselves; the whole business of their lives is a perversion of the
text of Scripture, which commandeth us, "in whatever station we are,
therewith to be content."
The gentility-monger is a family man, having a house somewhere in
Marylebone, or Pancras parish. He is sometimes a man of independent
fortune--how acquired, nobody knows; that is his secret, his mystery. He
will let no one suppose that he has ever been in trade; because, when a
man intends gentility-mongering, it must never be known that he has
formerly carried on the tailoring, or the shipping, or the
cheese-mongering, or the fish-mongering, or any other mongering than the
gentility-mongering. His house is very stylishly furnished; that is to
say, as unlike the house of a man of fashion as possible--the latter
having only things the best of their kind, and for use; the former
displaying every variety of extravagant gimcrackery, to impress you with
a profound idea of combined wealth and taste, but which, to an educated
eye and mind only, conveys a lively idea of ostentation. When you call
upon a gentility-monger, a broad-shouldered, coarse, ungentlemanlike
footman, in Aurora plushes, ushers you to a drawing-room, where, on
tables round, and square, and hexagonal, are set forth jars, porcelain,
china, and delft; shells, spars; stuffed parrots under bell-glasses;
corals, minerals, and an infinity of trumpery, among which albums,
great, small, and intermediate, must by no means be forgotten.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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