THOUGH I do not undertake to write a geographical account of the Fashionable World, yet I should think myself highly culpable were I to pass over this interesting part of the subject wholly in silence. My readers must be at the same time cautioned, not to form their expectations of the geography of Fashion from that of other countries. The fact is, that the whole community which sustains this appellation, extensive as it is, can scarcely be treated as having any peculiar or exclusive locality. The individuals who compose it, are not, it is true, absolute wanderers, like the tribes of Arabia; nor yet are they regular settlers, like the convicts at Botany Bay: but moveable and migratory to a certain degree, and to a certain degree stationary and permanent, they live among the inhabitants of the parent country; neither absolutely mixing with them, nor yet actually separated from them. This paradoxical state of the people renders it not a little difficult to reduce their territory within the rules of geographical description. They have, it is true, their _degrees_ and their _circles_; but these terms are used by people of Fashion in a sense so different from that which geographers have assigned them, that they afford no sort of assistance to the topographical enquirer. It is, I presume, on this account, that in all the improvements which have been made upon the globe, nothing has been done towards settling the meridian of Fashion; and though the Laplanders, the Hottentots, and the Esquimaux, have places assigned them, no more notice is taken of the people of Fashion, than if they either did not exist, or were not worthy of being mentioned. The only expedient, therefore, to which a writer can resort, in this dearth of geographical materials, is that of designating the territory of Fashion by the ordinary names of the several places through which it passes. And this is, in fact, strictly conformable to that usage which prevails in the language and communication of the people themselves: for London, Tunbridge, Bath, Weymouth, &c. are, in their mouths, names for little else than the lands and societies of Fashion which they respectively contain.