_NEW WORKS_

* * * * *


THE GREAT WORLD OF FASHION.


Satire is the pantomime of literature, and harlequin's jacket, his black
vizor, and his eel-like lubricity, are so many harmless satires on the
weak sides of our nature. The pen of the satirist is as effective as the
pencil of the artist; and provided it draw well, cannot fail to prove as
attractive. Indeed, the characters of pantomime, harlequin, columbine,
clown, and pantaloon, make up the best _quarto_ that has ever appeared on
the manners and follies of the times; and they may be turned to as grave
an account as any page of Seneca's Morals, or Cicero's Disputations;
however various the means, the end, or object, is the same, and all is
rounded with a sleep.

"The Great World," in the language of satire, is the "glass of fashion
and the mould of form." Its geography and history are as perpetually
changing as the modes of St. James's, or the features of one of its
toasted beauties; and what is written of it to-day may be dry, and its
time be out of joint, before it has escaped the murky precincts of the
printing-house. It is subtlety itself, and we know not "whence it cometh,
and whither it goeth." Its philosophy is concentric, for this Great World
consists of thousands of little worlds, _usque ad infinitum_, and we do
well if we become not giddy with looking on the wheels of its
vicissitudes.