Elegans "nascitur, non fit." A man is born a dandy, as he is born a poet.

There are heads that can't wear hats; there are necks that can't fit cravats; there are jaws that can't fill out collars--( Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier ambrotypes, if I remember rightly); there are tournures nothing can humanize, and movements nothing can subdue to the gracious suavity or elegant languor or stately serenity which belong to different styles of dandyism.
We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this country,--not a gratia-Dei, nor a juredivino one,--but a de-facto upper stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of common life like the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water about our wharves,--very splendid, though its origin may have been tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such unctuous commodities.

I say, then, we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory as its individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a whole.

Of course, money is its corner-stone.

But now observe this.