University of Virginia Library

THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN.

Mr. Noah Webster never made so pretty an exhibition
of his descriptive powers, as in that passage
of his great work, where he speaks of a dandy, as
a `male of the human species, who dresses himself
like a doll, and who carries his character on his
back.' I take blame to myself, Fritz, for having
thus far left you in comparative ignorance of a
class, which goes so much to make up the expression
of the town life, as that which is so cleverly
defined by the American Dictionary.

The growth of our fashionable man through the
various gradations of cellar life, drawing-room life,
club-life, committee life, and the life bankrupt,
and married, I have already traced: but of the
young gentleman now brought to your notice,growth
can hardly be predicated. He skims about, by
reason of his light draft, upon the surface of society;

and as he carries neither freight nor ballast,
his whole hulk looms over the busy tide, where we
are floating, each our several ways.

He may be found of varying age, from eighteen
to thirty; and between these limits he oscillates
playfully, as his whim, or the season may direct.
He smacks into the town life on a sudden; nothing
has been known of him as a school boy; and very
little of him as a child. His parentage indeed, is
nominal, and accredited: but his real generation
dates from those years of incipient manhood which
go immediately before his appearance upon the
boards of the town. He is found upon the street,
in the hotels, and at the watering places; sometimes
also he may be seen upon the steamboats or in railway
cars, where he wears colored shirts, and is shy.

On his clean linen days, he favors the fashionable
purlieus, such as Upper Broadway, Union
Square, and Fifth avenue; and is particularly fond
of a negligé position, upon the step of the New York
Hotel; or of an easy abandon (i. e. feet upon the
window) in the smoking room. If pinched for
funds, a matter which he keeps buttoned under his
own coat, he falls away during the hot months to
small sea-shore, or mountain places. Here, his
moustache, and town manner commend him to
hoydenish, lean young ladies, in very long stomachers,

who wear fond expressions, and read pocket
editions of the poets; and to those estimable middle
aged women who wear black mits and long
finger nails, and who talk about charming scenery.
He is cautious however, to avoid those old gentlemen,
who abound at small watering places, and
who carry yellow and black silk handkerchiefs,—
take snuff, play checkers, sneeze, and talk about
the rheumatiz, taxes, and politics. He cracks capital
jokes with a young woman who shuffles around
of a morning in patent India-rubbers—about the
petticoats that are hung upon the lilac bushes;
he also rolls at nine-pins occasionally, which amusement
he makes excessively diverting;—particularly
where a stout girl with a red face, keeps rolling the
balls to one side, and an old lady near by, in spectacles,
says—`la—suz!'

He is not, by half, so much a lion in the town,
as he is out of it; he does not find so much of
fondness to fatten on. It may be that he is a
graduate of a city college, flourishing possibly
one or two barbaric insignia; and in the full
communion with some initiatory association, which
serves as dry nurse to the New-York Club. He is
of course, a zealous admirer of the Opera; and
knows to a hair's breadth—when to laugh, when to
applaud, and when to go into ectasies.

Nothing proves such a finisher to one of these
young gentlemen, as a trip to Europe; it is of little
consequence that it be either long or wide. An
evening or two at the Gardens of Vauxhall, an
introduction to the foyer of the Haymarket, and a
week of a Paris winter's intrigue, are sufficient to
set up a young gentleman of ordinary ingenuity,
in our town, as an `old bird,' and a clever observer.
I should be gratified to meet with some such young
gentleman, who on a visit to Paris, had not experienced
an affair du cœur with a distinguished
lady;—of undoubted position; who was very rich,
and attended by two or three domestics; elegantly
dressed; occupying a splendid salon, and so on.

And the acquaintance is uniformly so unusual and
romantic!—very accidental in the first instance;
either it is—we met in a coach, or, `we met, 'twas
in a crowd;' or our young gentleman catches the
first glimpse of her at a public ball, where she is evidently
annoyed by the attentions thrust upon her;
she wears the air of a stranger; she is clearly much
above the ordinary level; she does not venture to
dance; and besides, she is very beautiful, and has
a servant in attendance.

Our young gentleman trembles at his own boldness,
as he seeks to learn, from the bonne, by virtue
of a bribe, the address of the fair mistress. And

then—what a glance of the eye, what dreams of
rapture, and what a studied billet-doux for the
next day's post! On such memories, our young
man about town, regales his friends, over a
cobbler at Sinclair's, or a dinner at Delmonico's.
But he carefully conceals from them the abounding
disappointment at the end; and with all his
praises of the lady, does not enlarge upon
that art, which imposed upon his folly, and
which stripped him of his money, and of his mirth.

For his physical characteristics, I may refer you
to this relation of a new, but accomplished correspondent:
“You often see his little lack-brain face,
peering from behind a cloud of smoke, in the windows
of the New-York Hotel; and the indifference
which he is apt to cultivate, is grown into a grateful,
and graceful inanity of expression. He has
purchased, for the approaching cool season, an
enormous bag-shaped coat, with huge collar rolling
up above the tips of his ears. His sleeves are loose,
and long enough to hide his fingers to the tips; and
he walks with his shoulders curiously hooked forward,
and his arms bowed stiffly out, as if he were
in the course of training for some very extraordinary
and unusual gymnastic feat.

From a button hole in his waistcoat, to a side
pocket, sweeps a tremendous chain of enamel and

gold, serving to sustain a very trifling watch, and
an inordinate quantity of oxidized charms, in the
shape of bronze women in bath tubs, opera-dancers'
legs, and horse's hoofs. You overtake him in the
street, and speak, (observe, Fritz, that I am quoting
from my correspondent,) expecting him to turn
his head; but such an expectation is very vain;
there is a slight lifting of the chin, a languid semi-revolution
at the hips; you see one corner of his
eye, and hear H' ah y,”—and—(to drop now my
correspondent,) it is the best he can do.

But, Fritz, is it not a waste of my paper, and an
added heaviness to my letters, to labor upon those
portraits, which when most finished, and most
true, make us most ashamed of our species? Yet
there are those who love such study, and who love
such samplers. A kind of mutual admiration, and
of mutual generation, sustains the class. Nature
not only favors bounteously the assimilation of
kindred spirits, but all the tendencies toward
assimilation. The young man about town, with
little to attract the ordinary observer, and less to
make afraid, will yet sustain a character for dignity,
possibly for wit, or even honesty, among those of
equal capacity and taste; nay, he may even be held
in high honor by small families of gossipping, elderly

ladies, or at the New York Club. Sus sui, canis
cani, bos bovi, et asinus asino pulcherrimus
videtur.

I am not familiar with the much lauded Fourier
and association doctrines; but it has sometimes
been a matter of curiosity to me, to conjecture in
what particular group, or phalanx, the young gentleman,
whose merits I have espoused in this paper,
would be entered. It does not appear to me that
he could safely be attached, either to the industrial,
or to the nursing groups; and I can only
conceive of his employment as a conversational
expounder of the system; which has now grown so
various under the teachings of different doctors,
that the vagaries of even a fool, could hardly infringe
upon the integrity of the leading idea, viz:
—the upsetting of society.

If the young man about town be of an easy moral
stamp, (and that stamp is current,) he had much
better be of good family, than of good wit. A
measurable position will set a refinement upon
errors, that would look very naked under the
coverings of a poor man's wit. It is French philosophy,
but the town will reckon it good,—more
especially if I give my authority. In la Nouvelle
Heloise, (which it is surprising that our publishers
have not translated—uniform with Consuelo,) the

father of Julie reproaches her mother for admitting
to her house St. Preux. `Who then should we
admit, if not gens d'Esprit?' says the mother.
—`Des gens sortables, madame, reprit il en colère,
qui puissent rèparer l'honneur d'une fille quand
ils l'ont offensèe.'[2]

I had hoped, Fritz, to jot down for you a few
of the oddities and strange things which belong to
the smaller watering-places along the shore, and
the skirts of the neighboring mountains; but my
present topics have crowded my paper, while the
cool evenings of the first autumn have fairly pushed
the summer festivities out of mind. I shall therefore
recur to the former matters of the town; and
having fairly set you adrift upon the winter's tide,
by two more pulls at the oar, I shall leave you to
your own pilotage, and to your own reflection.