But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the frivolous class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff about.  Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social intercourse.  What business has a man who knows nothing about the beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to talk about fashion to a set of people who, if one of the quality left a card at their doors, would contrive to keep it on the very top of their heap of the names of their two-story acquaintances, till it was as yellow as the Codex Vaticanus?

Wealth, too,—­what an endless repetition of the same foolish trivialities about it!  Take the single fact of its alleged uncertain tenure and transitory character.  In old times, when men were all the time fighting and robbing each other,—­in those tropical countries where the Sabeans and the Chaldeans stole all a man’s cattle and camels, and there were frightful tornadoes and rains of fire from heaven, it was true enough that riches took wings to themselves not unfrequently in a very unexpected way.  But, with common prudence in investments, it is not so now.  In fact, there is nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole, as money.  A man’s learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live and keep his memory green.

I do not think there is much courage or originality in giving utterance to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by conventional trumpery.  The only distinction which it is necessary to point out to feeble-minded folk is this:  that, in asserting the breadth and depth of that significance which gives to fashion and fortune their tremendous power, we do not indorse the extravagances which often disgrace the one, nor the meanness which often degrades the other.

A remark which seems to contradict a universally current opinion is not generally to be taken “neat,” but watered with the ideas of common-sense and commonplace people.  So, if any of my young friends should be tempted to waste their substance on white kids and “all-rounds,” or to insist on becoming millionaires at once, by anything I have said, I will give them references to some of the class referred to, well known to the public as providers of literary diluents, who will weaken any truth so that there is not an old woman in the land who cannot take it with perfect impunity.

I am afraid some of the blessed saints in diamonds will think I mean to flatter them.  I hope not;—­if I do, set it down as a weakness.  But there is so much foolish talk about wealth and fashion, (which, of course, draw a good many heartless and essentially vulgar people into the glare of their candelabra, but which have a real respectability and meaning, if we will only look at them stereoscopically, with both eyes instead of one,) that I thought it a duty to speak a few words for them.  Why can’t somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?