To want Style.

“It is difficult for me to explain, because your majesty has not seen specimens of that class of the community which is devoid of style, tact, and taste; but we have them in town, and we meet with them at watering-places; there indeed it is less in our power to keep quite clear of them.  They are to be seen all day and all night; if the sun shines, they are promenading in its beams; if a house is lighted up, they will enter its open door; if a fiddle is heard, they are dancing to its squeaking; if petticoats are worn short, theirs are up to their knees; they are never out of sight, never in repose; summer and winter, day and night, they seem in a state of fearful excitement, flirting, philandering, raffling, racing, practising, and patronizing; they are great people in a small way, and only considered great because nothing greater is at hand; they prefer reigning in hell (excuse the word, I quote Milton) to serving in heaven; in London they would be nothing, at Hogs Norton Spa, or Pumpington Wells, they are every thing; making difficulties about admissions to Lilliputian Almack’s.”

To have Style.

“To have style is to be always dressed to perfection, without appearing to care about the fashion; and to take the station and precedence which you are entitled to, without seeming to be solicitous about it.  I have seen dowagers at watering-places in a fever of anxiety about their rank and their consequence! patronizing puppetshows, seizing conspicuous seats, and withholding the sunshine of their smiles from commoners allied to older nobility than their own!  How I should enjoy seeing them lost in a London crowd, where not an eye would notice their aristocracy unless they wore their coronets on the tops of their bonnets!”

The Popular Complaint.

“I am afraid of catching the popular complaint:  all the professedly sane people in London are so evidently mad, that I am led to conclude that all the supposed lunatics are in their sound senses.

“For instance, your gay people, who toil through nominal pleasures, dressing by rule and compass, lacing, bracing, patching, painting, plastering, penciling, curling, pinching, and all to go out and be looked at:  going from party to party in the middle of the night, pretending not to be sleepy, suppressing each rising yawn, and trying to make the lips smile and the eyes twinkle, and to look animated in spite of fatigue:  and all this for no earthly purpose—­too old to care about lovers, and without daughters to marry.  Why should an ugly old maid of sixty-six take all these pains, or leave her own snug fireside, if she had not a touch of the popular complaint.

“Then your man of pleasure, risking his life at every corner in a cab, with a restive horse; wearing all his clothes painfully tight to show off his figure, confining his neck in a bandage, pouring liquids down his throat, though he knows they will give him a headache, sitting up all night shaking bits of bone together for the mere purpose of giving somebody a chance of winning all his money, or offering bets on racehorses to afford himself and family an opportunity of changing opulence for beggary!  He has the popular complaint of course.