Now, the portion of each place to which Fashion lays claim, is neither definite as to its dimensions, nor fixed as to its locality. In London, a small proportion of the whole is Fashionable; in Bath, the proportion is greater; and in some watering-places of the latest creation, Fashion puts in her demand for nearly the whole. The locality of its domains is also contingent and mutable. Various circumstances concur in determining, when a portion of ground shall become Fashionable, and when it shall cease to be such. The only rule of any steadiness with which I am acquainted, and which chiefly relates to the metropolis, is that which prescribes a _western_ latitude: {5} if this be excepted, (which indeed admits of no relaxation,) events of very little moment decide all the rest. If, for example, a Duchess, or the wife of some bourgeois-gentilhomme, who has purchased the privileges of the order, should open a suite of rooms for elegant society in any new quarter, the soil is considered to receive a sort of consecration by such a circumstance; and an indefinite portion of the vicinity is added to the territory of Fashion. If, on the other hand, a shop be opened, a sign hung out, or any symptom of business be shewn, in a quarter that has hitherto been a stranger to every sound but the rattling of carriages, the thunder of knockers, and the vociferation of coachmen and servants, it is ten to one but the privileges of Fashion are withdrawn from that place; and the whole range of buildings is gradually given up to those, who are either needy enough to keep shops, or vulgar enough to endure them. Now, it happens as a consequence from this adoption of new soil and disfranchisement of old, that the territory of Fashion is extremely irregular and interrupted. A traveller, determined to pursue its windings, would soon be involved in a most mysterious labyrinth; his track would be crossed by portions of country which throw him repeatedly out of his beat: insomuch that his progress would resemble that of a naturalist, who, in tracing the course of a mineral through the bowels of the earth, encounters various breaks and intersections, and often finds the corresponding parts of the same stratum unaccountably separated from each other.