It is a fact, that, the more restraint that
is inflicted on these individuals in the gilded drawing-room at home, the
more do they crave after the unshackled enjoyment of their animal
vulgarity abroad. Their principal characteristics are a love of large
plaids, and a choice vocabulary of popular idiomatic forms of speech; and
these will sufficiently define them in the saloons of the theatres and in
the cigar divans. But they are not ever thus. By no means. At home (which
does not naturally indicate their own house), having donned their "other
waistcoat" and their pin (emblematic of a blue hand grasping an egg, or of
a butterfly poised on a wheel)--pop! they are _gentlemen_. With the
hebdomadal sovereign straggling in the extreme verge of their
pockets--with the afternoon rebuke of the "principal," or peradventure of
some senior clerk, still echoing in their ears--they are GENTLEMEN. They
are desired to be such by their mother and sisters, and so they talk about
cool hundreds--and the points of horses--and (on the strength of the
dramatic criticisms in the _Satirist_) of Grisi in _Norma_, and Persiani
in _La Sonnambula_--of Taglioni and Cerito--of last season and the season
before that.
We know not how far the readers of PUNCH may be inclined to approve so
prosy an article as this in their pet periodical; but we have ventured to
appeal to them (as the most sensible people in the country) against a
class of shallow empirics, who have managed to glide unchidden into our
homes and our families, to chill the one and to estrange the other.
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