that is likely to be lasting?  Natural beauty of person is quite another thing:  this always has, it always will and must have, some weight even with men, and great weight with women.  But this does not want to be set off by expensive clothes.  Female eyes are, in such cases, very sharp:  they can discover beauty though half hidden by beard and even by dirt and surrounded by rags:  and, take this as a secret worth half a fortune to you, that women, however personally vain they may be themselves, despise personal vanity in men.

21.  Let your dress be as cheap as may be without shabbiness; think more about the colour of your shirt than about the gloss or texture of your coat; be always as clean as your occupation will, without inconvenience, permit; but never, no, not for one moment, believe, that any human being, with sense in his skull, will love or respect you on account of your fine or costly clothes.  A great misfortune of the present day is, that every one is, in his own estimate, raised above his real state of life:  every one seems to think himself entitled, if not to title and great estate, at least to live without work.  This mischievous, this most destructive, way of thinking has, indeed, been produced, like almost all our other evils, by the Acts of our Septennial and Unreformed Parliament.  That body, by its Acts, has caused an enormous Debt to be created, and, in consequence, a prodigious sum to be raised annually in taxes.  It has caused, by these means, a race of loan-mongers and stock-jobbers to arise.  These carry on a species of gaming, by which some make fortunes in a day, and others, in a day, become beggars.  The unfortunate gamesters, like the purchasers of blanks in a lottery, are never heard of; but the fortunate ones become companions for lords, and some of them lords themselves.  We have, within these few years, seen many of these gamesters get fortunes of a quarter of a million in a few days, and then we have heard them, though notoriously amongst the lowest and basest of human creatures, called ‘honourable gentlemen’!  In such a state of things, who is to expect patient industry, laborious study, frugality and care; who, in such a state of things, is to expect these to be employed in pursuit of that competence which it is the laudable wish of all men to secure?  Not long ago a man, who had served his time to a tradesman in London, became, instead of pursuing his trade, a stock-jobber, or gambler; and, in about two years, drove his coach-and-four, had his town house and country house, and visited, and was visited by, peers of the highest rank!  A fellow-apprentice of this lucky gambler, though a tradesman in excellent business, seeing no earthly reason why he should not have his coach-and-four also, turned his stock in trade into a stake for the ’Change; but, alas! at the end of a few months, instead of being in a coach-and-four, he was in the Gazette!