his fondness names them Jeunesse
doree, Golden, or Gilt Youth. They have come out, these Gilt Youths, in
a kind of resuscitated state; they wear crape round the left arm, such
of them as were Victims. More they carry clubs loaded with lead; in an
angry manner: any Tappe-dur or remnant of Jacobinism they may fall
in with, shall fare the worse. They have suffered much: their friends
guillotined; their pleasures, frolics, superfine collars ruthlessly
repressed: 'ware now the base Red Nightcaps who did it! Fair Cabarus and
the Army of Greek sandals smile approval. In the Theatre Feydeau, young
Valour in square-tailed coat eyes Beauty in Greek sandals, and kindles
by her glances: Down with Jacobinism! No Jacobin hymn or demonstration,
only Thermidorian ones, shall be permitted here: we beat down Jacobinism
with clubs loaded with lead.

But let any one who has examined the Dandy nature, how petulant it is,
especially in the gregarious state, think what an element, in sacred
right of insurrection, this Gilt Youth was! Broils and battery; war
without truce or measure! Hateful is Sansculottism, as Death and Night.
For indeed is not the Dandy culottic, habilatory, by law of existence;
'a cloth-animal: one that lives, moves, and has his being in cloth?'--

So goes it, waltzing, bickering; fair Cabarus, by Orphic witchery,
struggling to recivilise mankind. Not unsuccessfully, we hear. What
utmost Republican grimness can resist Greek sandals, in Ionic motion,
the very toes covered with gold rings? (Ibid. Mercier, ubi supra.) By
degrees the indisputablest new-politeness rises; grows, with vigour. And
yet, whether, even to this day, that inexpressible tone of society known
under the old Kings, when Sin had 'lost all its deformity' (with or
without advantage to us), and airy Nothing had obtained such a local
habitation and establishment as she never had,--be recovered? Or even,
whether it be not lost beyond recovery? (De Stael, Considerations iii.
c. 10, &c.)--Either way, the world must contrive to struggle on.

Chapter 3.7.III.

Quiberon.

But indeed do not these long-flowing hair-queues of a Jeunesse Doree
in semi-military costume betoken, unconsciously, another still more
important tendency? The Republic, abhorrent of her Guillotine, loves her
Army.

And with cause. For, surely, if good fighting be a kind of honour, as it
is, in its season; and be with the vulgar of men, even the chief kind of
honour, then here is good