the result of the great attention paid to finery
of all sorts, which is more characteristic of
the army than of any other form of serving.
Lower still, and meaner still, we come to
button-worship in the glorified vanity of the
greengrocer's son, whose highest ambition it is
to die a butler, a gorgeous butler, redolent of
port and master of some three per cents, and
who takes his first step on that high ladder of
future flunkey fame, in hiring himself out as
your honour's Buttons—or your honour's
honoured lady's page. Any how, he is Buttons; a
greedy fat-faced shrewd-tongued boy, pimpled
with shining knobs which to him are worth so
many patents of nobility, every one of them.
I doubt if he would care to exchange them,
during the first week of his embryonic butlership,
for my lord duke's strawberry leaves, or
the baron's balls. He might exchange them
for John's shoulder-knot and plush if you will;
but for the most part he is thoroughly content
with his degree, and envies no man his fuller
honours. From the greedy little greengrocer's
son, then, up to the Emperor of China sitting
on his yellow throne between the backs of
dragons, there is but one law regulating the
human mass, and that is—Buttons.

Show me a man's buttons and I will tell you
his life and character; and not only his, but his
household's; and the life, character, and daily
going of his wife and daughters—if he has any.
And if he has not I can tell you this, too, and of
what manner of womanhood is his laundress and
room-keeper. First, there is the old-fashioned
country gentleman, who will stick to his brass
and blue, let the tailors say what they like.
Cloth may come in, and cloth may go out,
and the fashion may change as often as there
are days in the year, but the fine old English
gentleman cares nothing for that. Brass and
blue, with a blue bird's-eye necktie and
nankeen-coloured vest were his favourite wear when
he was a buck, and the world was, oh! ever so
much brighter and gayer than it is now, and do
you think he is going to make a popinjay of
himself now, and change his ways because
a few young fools do not know when they are
well off? I can read that man's heart like an
open book, all in the mirror of his brass and
blue. The rare old claret and generous port
down in those cobwebbed bins of his; the high
Tory prejudices—Church and State, and the
Queen, God bless her! and every—blanked—
radical to the treadmill, and the poor man to his
daily labour, and be thankful he has any daily
labour to go to; and mechanics' institutes, and
night schools, and popular lectures to the devil,
where they originally came from; a healthy
breeze on an autumn morning, with Reynard
running low and the scent lying well; and
England, the finest country, sir, on the face of
the earth, and Sussex the finest county in it;
and one Englishman can beat three—blanked—
Frenchmen, with their soup-maigre and their
frog fricassées; and the worst day that ever
dawned on English homes was when Johnny
Crapaud came over as a friend, and by Heaven,
sir, was not met at the point of the bayonet!
This is what the fine old English gentleman is,
when given up to brass and blue. Then there is
the fashionable man, a little loud and flashy,
whose buttons are always marked features in
his attire, and who gets all the newest things
that come out, whether they are deaths' heads
or foxes', malachite or coral. This is the man
who is independent of female aid in the matter
of buttons; whose fronts are fastened with studs,
and his sleeves with links; whose waistcoat-
buttons are bolted from within, and who can go
through the world with only a useful-handed
"fellow," proudly indifferent to needles and
thread, and all that these imply. This is the
man of the clubs, and the omnibus-box at the
opera; the man without a home, whose life
passes in a round of dissipation, and who is
independent of matrimony for pleasure or position;
the man who has no tnought of marrying, and
about whom Belgravian mothers write their
lamentations. But the real cause of the fall in
the marriage market is the substitution of studs
and bolted buttons for the mother-o'-pearl and
thread kinds. Once on a time a wife was an
absolute necessity with every gentleman for his
buttons' sake, if for nothing else. Now he can
do without them—he wears studs.

Then there is that other fashionable man, of a
lower grade than the last—he who would be
fashionable if he could, but who is only able to
be a swell, and a third-rate imitator. He copies
his more fortunate cousin in manner if not in
quality, wearing bone, coloured pink or blue,
against the other's coral and turquoise, and
making paste and wash do the work of jewels
and golden setting. I could run off a whole
chapter of such a man's private life—of bad
companions, late hours, fast amusements, and
the Haymarket to finish with: of foolish pride,
that must seem to be what it is not, with,
perhaps, a poor mother on limited means somewhere
down in the country, dreaming by night and
praying by day for her darling son's innocency
and advancement; or a young girl sitting watching
for the return that does not come, pale with
hope or faint with despair. I can see all this,
with the end of manly reformation or of sunken
sodden ruin, in the flashy buttons of that vulgar
would-be's vest and front. Who does not know
the sportsman by his buttons, full of dogs and
deer and foxes? and of what countryman, for
certain, is that sallow-looking individual who
passes with a huge hooded cloak, braided and
buttoned in such profusion? Would you, or
would you not, incline to believe that young
lady "fast" who wears a duffel coat, with big
bone buttons about the size of a five-franc piece,
and puts her hands in her pockets as she walks?
and is not the strong-minded woman known by
her buttons, which are not so much of the fast
as of the masculine school? That strong-
minded woman would scorn Laura Matilda's
pretty little dainty trifles of aluminum and
filigree gilt; she would have none of those charming
blackberries or half-opened rosebuds which
Lucy Angelina puts on as foils or emblems, as