University of Virginia Library

STYLE.

In no instance have I seen this grasping after style
more whimsically exhibited than in the family of my old
acquaintance Timothy Giblet. I recollect old Giblet
when I was a boy, and he was the most surly curmudgeon
I ever knew. He was a perfect scare-crow to the small-fry
of the day, and inherited the hatred of all these unlucky

little shavers; for never could we assemble about
his door of an evening to play, and make a little hubbuh,
but out he sallied from his nest like a spider, flourished
his formidable horse-whip, and dispersed the whole crew
in the twinkling of a lamp. I perfectly remember a bill
he sent in to my father for a pane of sound glass I had
accidentally broken, which came well nigh getting me a
flogging; and I remember, as perfectly, that the next night
I revenged myself by breaking half-a-dozen. Giblet was
as arrant a grub-worm as ever crawled; and the only rules
of right and wrong he cared a button for, were the rules
of multiplication and addition; which he practised much
more successfully than he did any of the rules of religion
or morality. He used to declare they were the true golden
rules; and he took special care to put Cocker's arithmetic
in the hands of his children, before they had
read ten pages in the bible or the prayer book. The practice
of these favourite maxims was at length crowned
with the harvest of success; and after a life of incessant
self-denial, and starvation, and after enduring all the
pounds, shillings and pence miseries of a miser, he had the
satisfaction of seeing himself worth a plum, and of dying
just as he had determined to enjoy the remainder of his
days in contemplating his great wealth and accumulating
mortgages.

His children inherited his money; but they buried
the disposition, and every other memorial of their father
in his grave. Fired with a noble thirst for style, they
instantly emerged from the retired lane in which themselves
and their accomplishments had hitherto been buried;
and they blazed, and they whizzed, and they cracked
about town, like a nest of squibs and devils in a fire-work.
I can liken their sudden eclat to nothing but that
of the locust, which is hatched in the dust, where it increases
and swells up to maturity, and after feeling for
a moment the vivifying rays of the sun, bursts forth a
mighty insect, and flutters and rattles, and buzzes from
every tree. The little warblers, who have long cheered
the woodlands with their dulcet notes, are stunned by
the discordant racket of these upstart intruders, and contemplate,
in contemptuous silence, their tinsel and their
noise.

Having once started, the Giblets were determined that
nothing should stop them in their career, until they
had run their full course and arrived at the very tip-top

of style. Every tailor, every shoemaker, every coachmaker,
every milliner, every mantua-maker, every paper-hanger,
every piano-teacher, and every dancing-master in
the city, were enlisted in their service; and the willing
wights most courteously answered their call, and fell to
work to build up the fame of the Giblets, as they had
done that of many an aspiring family before them. In
a little time the young ladies could dance the waltz, thunder
Lodoiska, murder French, kill time, and commit violence
on the face of nature in a landscape in water-colours,
equal to the best lady in the land, and the young
gentlemen were seen lounging at corners of streets, and
driving tandem; heard talking loud at the theatre, and
laughing in church, with as much ease and grace, and
modesty, as if they had been gentlemen all the days of
their lives.

And the Giblets arrayed themselves in scarlet, and in
fine linen, and seated themselves in high places; but no
body noticed them except to honour them with a little
contempt. The Giblets made a prodigious splash in
their own opinion; but nobody extolled them except the
tailors, and the milliners, who had been employed in manufacturing
their paraphernalia. The Giblets thereupon
being, like Caleb Quotem, determined to have “a place
at the review,” fell to work more fiercely than ever;—
they gave dinners, and they gave balls; they hired cooks;
they hired confectioners; and they would have kept a
newspaper in pay, had they not been all bought up at that
time for the election. They invited the dancing men,
and the dancing women, and the gormandizers, and the
epicures of the city, to come and make merry at their
expense; and the dancing men, and the dancing women,
and the epicures, and the gormandizers, did come; and
they did make merry at their expense; and they eat, and
they drank, and they capered, and they danced, and they
—laughed at their entertainers.

Then commenced the hurry and the bustle, and the
mighty nothingness of fashionable life;—such rattling in
coaches! such flaunting in the streets! such slamming of
box-doors at the theatre! such a tempest of bustle and unmeaning
noise wherever they appeared! The Giblets were
seen here and there and every where;—they visited every
body they knew, and every body they did not know;
and there was no getting along for the Giblets. Their
plan at length succeeded. By dint of dinners, of feeding

and frolicking the town, the Giblet family worked
themselves into notice, and enjoyed the ineffable pleasure
of being for ever pestered by visiters, who cared nothing
about them; of being squeezed, and smothered, and parboiled
at nightly balls, and evening tea-parties; they
were allowed the privilege of forgetting the very few old
friends they once possessed;—they turned their noses up
in the wind at every thing that was not genteel; and
their superb manners and sublime affectation at length
left it no longer a matter of doubt that the Giblets were
perfectly in the style.