The last number of the Edinburgh Review remarks, in the course of one of its papers, that any person living much in London during the last few years, must have observed the great improvement of general society, the gradual disappearance of the old apathy and fopperies, and the general tendency in higher circles to more manly tastes. The various matters of stirring political interest, commencing with the catholick question, which have lately agitated England, have given men’s minds a new turn, and raised more worthy objects of ambition for the young and wealthy than those which had stimulated their emulation in the circles of fashion.

“Young men, (says the reviewer,) formerly contented with the honours acquited from horses and hats, and the golden opinions of clubwindowed loungers, have caught the political fervour that pervades the working classes themselves. Politicks is no longer a thing apart from the ordinary pursuits and occupations of society ; it enters into the ideas, it pervades the conversation, it colours the opinions of whole classes of men, who ten years ago, would have voted all ‘politicks a bore.

Alas, then, for the rising race of Pelhams, the schools of embryo Brummels, who, ignorant of the changes of the time, are forming themselves upon the precious models of a few years since. We meet such in Broadway continually; a callow brood of fledglings, that disport themselves on a sunshiny autumnal afternoon, like those straggling flies that still linger when their season is gone, unmindful of the destroying winter that is even now upon them.

England, with these worthy young gentlemen, (who lack the genius or enterprise to invent absurdities of their own,) is the myatick name that determines the orthodoxy of each peculiarity of mode and manner; and now that she no longer owns the hybrid race of which they would fain boast themselves an off-shoot; now that dandyism has been struck down in the high-places of London, cast out and foresworn as the stale growth of a bygone age, they will find themselves in a condition of utter bewilderment. Their situation is like the disconsolate Mussulman’s, who found the tinsel toys which, with great pains, he had brought to market, turned into chips just as he was on the point of disposing of them to advantage.

Apropos to Mussulmen, there is a dogma of the religious sect of the Sunees that might be advantageously embraced by some people. These ingenious followers of Omar carry so far their pious dislike to portraits and statues, and other idolatrous resemblances of the human form divine, that they believe that the artist who makes the canvass glow, the marble breathe, must, at the day of judgment, find a soul for each human figure that his pencil hath shadowed forth, or his chisel wrought. His own spirit is then divided and diffused through the forms his hand has created; and, like the jellied quarl, that becomes complete again in each part when divided by the school-boy swimmer, the essential and elastick spirit expands in its new habitations, each division of it becoming endued with the full sensibility to suffering that existed in the parent soul before its partition. Upon their general punishment in the infernal regions, we need not dwell; but only think if the fate of these unhappy Mahometan painters was to be visited upon the tailors, mantuamakers, and other artists who deal in human effigies, how much they would have to answer for! To take a single instance, think but of the many creations of his hands, the walking mannakins, for whom Stultz would have to hand a soul, and compute the amount of his torments when suffering the pains of perdition in each ! Let his respectable fraternity dwell upon the awful contingencies which they may now escape ; being no longer called upon to get up those profane effigies of men in whose creation they once enacted so important a part: and then, like true followers of the Omar, the legal successor of the Prophet, rejoice that this impious and most un-mahometan mockery of human nature will pass away in the decay of dandyism.

From: The New-York mirror. September 16, 1837. Vol. 15, No. 12.