SKETCHES AND TRAVELS IN LONDON.

MR. BROWN'S LETTERS TO HIS NEPHEW.

IT is with the greatest satisfaction, my dear Robert, that I have you as a neighbor, within a couple of miles of me, and that I have seen you established comfortably in your chambers in Fig-tree Court. The situation is not cheerful, it is true; and to clamber up three pairs of black creaking stairs is an exercise not pleasant to a man who never cared for ascending mountains. Nor did the performance of the young barrister who lives under you— and, it appears, plays pretty constantly upon the French horn-give me any great pleasure as I sat and partook of luncheon in your rooms. Your female attendant or laundress, too, struck me from her personal appearance to be a lady addicted to the use of ardent spirits; and the smell of tobacco, which you say some old college friends of yours had partaken on the night previous, was, I must say, not pleasant in the chambers, and I even thought might be remarked as lingering in your own morning-coat. However, I am an old fellow. The use of cigars has come in since my time (and, I must own, is adopted by many people of the first fashion), and these and other inconveniences are surmounted more gayly by young fellows like yourself than by oldsters of my standing. It pleased me, however, to see the picture of the old house at home over the mantel-piece. Your college prize-books make a very good show in your bookcases; and I was glad to remark in the looking-glass the cards of both our excellent county Members. The rooms, altogether, have a reputable appearance; and I hope, my dear fellow, that the Society of the Inner Temple will have a punctual tenant.

As you have now completed your academical studies, and

are about to commence your career in London, I propose, my dear Nephew, to give you a few hints for your guidance; which, although you have an undoubted genius of your own, yet come from a person who has had considerable personal experience, and, I have no doubt, would be useful to you if you did not disregard them, as, indeed, you will most probably do.

With your law studies it is not my duty to meddle. I have seen you established, one of six pupils, in Mr. Tapeworm's chambers in Pump Court, seated on a high-legged stool on a foggy day, with your back to a blazing fire. At your father's desire, I have paid a hundred guineas to that eminent special pleader, for the advantages which I have no doubt you will enjoy, while seated on the high-legged stool in his back room, and rest contented with your mother's prediction that you will be Lord Chief Justice some day. May you prosper, my dear fellow! is all I desire. By the way, I should like to know what was the meaning of a pot of porter which entered into your chambers as I issued from them at one o'clock, and trust that it was not your thirst which was to be quenched with such a beverage at such an hour.

It is not, then, with regard to your duties as a law-student that I have a desire to lecture you, but in respect of your pleasures, amusements, acquaintances, and general conduct and bearing as a young man of the world.

I will rush into the subject at once, and exemplify my morality in your own person. Why, sir, for instance, do you wear that tuft to your chin, and those sham turquoise buttons to your waistcoat! A chin-tuft is a cheap enjoyment certainly, and the twiddling it about, as I see you do constantly, so as to show your lower teeth, a harmless amusement to fill up your vacuous hours. And as for waistcoat-buttons, you will say, "Do not all the young men wear them, and what can I do but buy artificial turquoise, as I cannot afford to buy real stones?"

I take you up at once and show you why you ought to shave off your tip and give up the factitious jewellery. My dear Bob, in spite of us and all the Republicans in the world, there are ranks and degrees in life and society, and distinctions to be maintained by each man according to his rank and degree. You have no more right, as I take it, to sport an imperial on your chin than I have to wear a shovel-hat with a rosette. I hold a tuft to a man's chin to be the centre of a system, so to speak, which ought all to correspond and be harmonious

the whole tune of a man's life ought to be played in that key.

Look, for instance, at Lord Hugo Fitzsurse seated in the private box at the Lyceum, by the side of that beautiful creature with the black eyes and the magnificent point-lace, who you fancied was ogling you through her enormous spy-glasses. Lord Hugo has a tuft to his chin, certainly, his countenance grins with a perfect vacuity behind it, and his whiskers curl crisply round one of the handsomest and stupidest countenances in the world.

But just reckon up in your own mind what it costs him to keep up that simple ornament on his chin. Look at every article of that amiable and most gentleman-like — though, I own, foolish-young man's dress, and see how absurd it is of you to attempt to imitate him. Look at his hands (I have the young nobleman perfectly before my mind's eye now); the little hands are dangling over the cushion of the box gloved as tightly and delicately as a lady's. His wristbands are fastened up towards his elbows with jewellery. Gems and rubies meander down his pink shirt-front and waistcoat. He wears a watch with an apparatus of gimcracks at his waistcoatpocket. He sits in a splendid side-box, or he simpers out of the windows at White's," or you see him grinning out of a cab by the Serpentine-a lovely and costly picture, surrounded by a costly frame.

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Whereas you and I, my good Bob, if we want to see a play, do not disdain an order from our friend the newspaper Editor, or to take a seat in the pit. Your watch is your father's old hunting-watch. When we go in the Park we go on foot, or at best get a horse up after Easter, and just show in Rotten Row. We shall never look out of "White's" bow-window. The amount of Lord Hugo's tailor's bill would support you and your younger brother. His valet has as good an allowance as you, besides his perquisites of old clothes. You cannot afford to wear a dandy lord's cast-off old clothes, neither to imitate those which he wears.

There is nothing disagreeable to me in the notion of a dandy any more than there is in the idea of a peacock, or a camelopard, or a prodigious gaudy tulip, or an astonishingly bright brocade. There are all sorts of animals, plants, and stuff's in Nature, from peacocks to tom-tits, and from cloth-of-gold to corduroy, whereof the variety is assuredly intended by Nature, and certainly adds to the zest of life. Therefore, I do not say that Lord Hugo is a useless being, or bestow the least contempt upon him.

Nay, it is right gratifying and natural that he should be, and be as he is handsome and graceful, splendid and perfumed, beautiful-whiskered and empty-headed, a sumptuous dandy and man of fashion—and what you young men have denominated A Swell."

But a cheap Swell, my dear Robert (and that little chin ornament as well as certain other indications which I have remarked in your simple nature, lead me to insist upon this matter rather strongly with you), is by no means a pleasing object for our observation, although he is presented to us so frequently. Try, my boy, and curb any little propensity which you may have to dresses that are too splendid for your station. You do not want light kid-gloves and wristbands up to your elbows, copying out Mr. Tapeworm's Pleas and Declarations; you will only blot them with lawyers' ink over your desk, and they will impede your writing: whereas Lord Hugo may decorate his hands in any way he likes, because he has little else to do with them but to drive cabs, or applaud dancinggirls' pirouettes, or to handle a knife and fork or a toothpick as becomes the position in life which he fills in so distinguished a manner. To be sure since the days of friend Æsop, Jackdaws have been held up to ridicule for wearing the plumes of birds to whom Nature has affixed more gaudy tails; but as Folly is constantly reproducing itself, so must Satire, and our honest Mr. Punch has but to repeat to the men of our generation the lessons taught by the good-natured Hunchback his predecessor.

Shave off your tuft, then, my boy, and send it to the girl of your heart as a token, if you like: and I pray you abolish the jewellery, towards which I clearly see you have a propensity. As you have a plain dinner at home, served comfortably on a clean table-cloth, and not a grand service of half a dozen entrées, such as we get at our county Member's (and an uncommonly good dinner it is too), so let your dress be perfectly neat, polite, and cleanly, without any attempts at splendor. Magnificence is the decency of the rich — but it cannot be purchased with half a guinea a day, which, when the rent of your chambers is paid, I take to be pretty nearly the amount of your worship's income. This point, I thought, was rather well illustrated the other day, in an otherwise silly and sentimental book which I looked over at the Club, called the "Foggarty Diamond" (or some such vulgar name). Somebody gives the hero, who is a poor fellow, a diamond pin: he is obliged to buy a new stock to set off the diamond, then a new waistcoat, to correspond

with the stock, then a new coat, because the old one is too shabby for the rest of his attire; - finally, the poor devil is ruined by the diamond ornament, which he is forced to sell, as I would recommend you to sell your waistcoat studs, were they worth anything.

But as you have a good figure and a gentlemanlike deportment, and as every young man likes to be well attired, and ought, for the sake of his own advantage and progress in life, to show himself to the best advantage, I shall take an early opportunity of addressing you on the subject of tailors and clothes, which at least merit a letter to themselves.

ON TAILORING-AND TOILETS IN GENERAL.

OUR ancestors, my dear Bob, have transmitted to you (as well as every member of our family,) considerable charms of person and figure, of which fact, although you are of course perfectly aware, yet, and equally of course, you have no objection to be reminded; and with these facial and corporeal endowments, a few words respecting dress and tailoring may not be out of place for nothing is trivial in life, and everything to the philosopher has a meaning. As in the old joke about a pudding which has two sides, namely an inside and an outside, so a coat or a hat has its inside as well as its outside; I mean, that there is in a man's exterior appearance the consequence of his inward ways of thought, and a gentleman who dresses too grandly, or too absurdly, or too shabbily, has some oddity, or insanity, or meanness in his mind, which develops itself somehow outwardly in the fashion of his garments.

No man has a right to despise his dress in this world. There is no use in flinging any honest chance whatever away. For instance, although a woman cannot be expected to know the particulars of a gentleman's dress, any more than we to be acquainted with the precise nomenclature or proper cut of the various articles which those dear creatures wear, yet to what lady in a society of strangers do we feel ourselves most naturally inclined to address ourselves? to her or those whose appearance pleases us; not to the gaudy, over-dressed Dowager or Miss nor to her whose clothes, though handsome, are put on in a slatternly manner, but to the person who looks neat, and trim, and elegant, and in whose person we fancy we see ex