strong moral influence, as a patriotic, a literary, a religious movement, and feel that the moral sentiment rules man and nature.  We think all other distinctions and ties will be slight and fugitive, this of caste or fashion, for example; yet come from year to year, and see how permanent that is, in this Boston or New York life of man, where, too, it has not the lease countenance from the law of the land.  Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more impassable line.  Here are associations whose ties go over, and under, and through it, a meeting of merchants, a military corps, a college-class, a fire-club, a professional association, a political, a religious convention;—­the persons seem to draw inseparably near; yet that assembly once dispersed, its members will not in the year meet again.  Each returns to his degree in the scale of good society, porcelain remains porcelain, and earthen earthen.  The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the nature of this union and selection can be neither frivolous nor accidental.  Each man’s rank in that perfect graduation depends on some symmetry in his structure, or some agreement in his structure to the symmetry of society.  Its doors unbar instantaneously to a natural claim of their own kind.  A natural gentleman finds his way in, and will keep the oldest patrician out, who has lost his intrinsic rank.  Fashion understands itself; good-breeding and personal superiority of whatever country readily fraternize with those of every other.  The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished themselves in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure.[409]

9.  To say what good of fashion we can,—­it rests on reality, and hates nothing so much as pretenders;—­to exclude and mystify pretenders, and send them into everlasting “Coventry,"[410] is its delight.  We contemn, in turn, every other gift of men of the world; but the habit, even in little and the least matters, of not appealing to any but our own sense of propriety, constitutes the foundation of all chivalry.  There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and proportioned, which fashion does not occasionally adopt, and give it the freedom of its saloons.  A sainted soul is always elegant, and, if it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded ring.  But so will Jock the teamster pass, in some crisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as long as his head is not giddy with the new circumstance, and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in waltzes and cotillions.  For there is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.  The maiden at her first ball, the countryman at a city dinner, believes that there is a ritual according to which every act and compliment must be performed, or the failing party must be cast out of this presence.  Later, they learn that good sense and character make their own forms every moment, and speak or abstain, to take wine or refuse