The American gentleman Author:Charles Butler Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ON THE INFLUENCE OF FASHION. They who are exempted by their elevated condition from the confinement of commercial and professional life, involve themselves in... more » voluntary slavery by engaging in the service of the tyrant, Fashion. They are compelled to abstain from actions in themselves pleasing and innocent, however strong their inclination to them, because the caprice of some distinguished character has prohibited them by his example. Like the dullest of animals, they are driven round the same circle, from which once to deviate would subject them to an appellation of all others the most formidable. To be called profligate, extravagant, intemperate, or even wicked, might be tolerated with patience; but who could bear to live with the epithet of un- genteel ? People of fashion, once admitted to thishonour- able title, form a little world of their own, and learn to look down upon all others as beings of a subordinate nature. It is, then, a natural question, In what does this superiority consist ? It arises not from learning; for the most illiterate claim it, and are indulged in the claim: it arises not from virtue; for the most vicious are not excluded. Wealth, beauty, birth, and elegance, are not the only qualifications for it; because many enjoy it who have no just pretension to either, and many are denied it who possess them all. It seems to be a combination of numbers under two or three leaders inhigh life, who agree to imitate each other, ana to maintain, by the majority of voices and the effrontery of pride, that all they do is proper, and all they say is sensible; that their dress is becoming, their manners polite, their houses tasteful, their furniture, their carriages, all that appertains to them, the models and standards of real beauty. Those who come not within the pa...« less