beauty
of person is quite another thing: this always has, it always will and
must have, some weight even with men, and great weight with women. But
this does not want to be set off by expensive clothes. Female eyes are,
in such cases, very sharp: they can discover beauty though half hidden
by beard and even by dirt and surrounded by rags: and, take this as a
secret worth half a fortune to you, that women, however personally vain
they may be themselves, _despise personal vanity in men_.

21. Let your dress be as cheap as may be without _shabbiness_; think
more about the colour of your shirt than about the gloss or texture of
your coat; be always as _clean_ as your occupation will, without
inconvenience, permit; but never, no, not for one moment, believe, that
any human being, with sense in his skull, will love or respect you on
account of your fine or costly clothes. A great misfortune of the
present day is, that every one is, in his own estimate, _raised above
his real state of life_: every one seems to think himself entitled, if
not to title and great estate, at least _to live without work_. This
mischievous, this most destructive, way of thinking has, indeed, been
produced, like almost all our other evils, by the Acts of our Septennial
and Unreformed Parliament. That body, by its Acts, has caused an
enormous Debt to be created, and, in consequence, a prodigious sum to be
raised annually in taxes. It has caused, by these means, a race of
loan-mongers and stock-jobbers to arise. These carry on a species of
_gaming_, by which some make fortunes in a day, and others, in a day,
become beggars. The unfortunate gamesters, like the purchasers of blanks
in a lottery, are never heard of; but the fortunate ones become
companions for lords, and some of them lords themselves. We have, within
these few years, seen many of these gamesters get fortunes of a quarter
of a million in a few days, and then we have heard them, though
notoriously amongst the lowest and basest of human creatures, called
'_honourable gentlemen_'! In such a state of things, who is to expect
patient industry, laborious study, frugality and care; who, in such a
state of things, is to expect these to be employed in pursuit of that
competence which it is the laudable wish of all men to secure? Not long
ago a man, who had served his time to a tradesman in London, became,
instead of pursuing his trade, a stock-jobber, or gambler; and, in about
_two years_, drove his