and wrote from their very hot-bed; these persons in retiring from all the summer acquaintances and dull contagions of high life, cannot be supposed to have so acted from ignorance of its imaginary pleasures. Splendour, we distinctly learn from them, becomes uninteresting, high living insipid, flattery nauseous, and homage troublesome, after a full experience of them.(16)

We conclude that the same round of delusive enjoyments must bring tediousness in their train. There is no pleasure that does not become blunted and indifferent as it grows habitual; and, above all others, the automaton vivacity of the ball-room dies most quickly its natural death.

"Revelry, and dance, and show,

Suffer a syncope and solemn pause.”

Artificial stimulants, drug them as you will, leave the system less itself than before. This is a property of the machine for which there is no remedy. Let desire be anticipated; let no time be suffered to elapse between the wish and its accomplishment; still pleasure leaves us behind, never where it found us; and enjoyment travelleth only to a certain bound-beyond is

agony. The heart always suffers a re-action of this kind; it is in the nature of things. We may as well attempt to invade the prerogatives of heaven, as to make happiness !(17)

§ 8-But the view under which we would more especially regard fashion, is as it concerns women. "The power of resistance to evil in the female breast, is so much the less, where fashion extends impunity to the frail offender, and screens the loss of character." In exposing them to the deformities of the day, and allowing them to taste its rank poisons, the effect is, to an untold degree, vicious: and first, if we watch this infatuated class of society, we are not at liberty to doubt the injurious agency of fashion upon the mind.

For one of the most obvious points of observation in a fashionable mind, is the perfect nonexistence of any idea as to what life is really for. Among the mass of trifling corruptions that find entrance there, there is no such thought as, 'for what purpose do I exist? These beings are fit for nothing but to be lodgers a little while in the houses of their ancestors. They might as well have been born in some remote

* Hazlitt.

island of the South Sea; for they drag on through the night of fashionable existence, as if death, which must come, were to be an eternal sleep. The only knowledge at all coveted, is of this order :-intelligence of the movements of one another; where equipages deposit their burthens; whose party has had the most numerous and titled attendance; who kissed hands,' and who is at the Pavilion. To see their own names in the diurnal rubricks of Fashion is the very pitch of glory. All else in this sublunary world is voted as nothing!

And what is conversation, under its least offensive shapes, among them? A mere interchange of common places, filled up with annoying repetitions of stale impertinencies to every new comer; matters indifferent, alone obtain emphatic place:-If there be not sufficient knowledge to satisfy the mind, there will always be found enough to disgust it. The grand charm of social intercourse, viz., sympathy with others and (at least, seeming) forgetfulness of self, is, among the mob of fashion, utterly forgotten; and conversation is only a mirror, still presenting the impertinent figure of the speaker. Surely, politeness does not demand that we

should still listen untired-that we should sacrifice the most valuable of all things, Time, in giving a patient hearing to the tongue of affected vanity. To submit passively to an immolation of this sort, is a self-sacrifice too withering !

An habitual vacuity of mind is the characteristic of this class of society; their only activity is that in common with beasts; they are igna

m pecus, an idle set, a thought-abhorring crew, with heads of mud as well as hearts of stone. The air around them is Boeotian; they vegetate on in incurable apathy, and continue to move on sottishly upon their own dead level. • Difficiles nuga' form the staple of their existence. The chambers of the soul are all darkened, as though they had been formed to dullness: "The polished idleness of aristocratic life in England*” is necessarily productive of what Burke calls "the fat stupidity and gross ignorance that prevails in courts."

"Rarus enim ferme sensus communis in illa
Fortuna."

Juv.

And they are as incurable as they are stupid. To talk to such people on their besotted ways; to tell them we live for something better, and * Sir. J. Mackintosh.

that happiness is possible, would be to discourse on music to the deaf, or colours to the blind; their ideas are all inconsequent, depraved, and irrelative to the very idea of improvement. They are fools by system, clothing their minds like their bodies after the fashion in vogue, and without examination; they think in a mass, and are only individually remarkable for more or less of that high-bred, presumptuous ignorance, which, as it knows no cause, can foresee no effect. Their ignorance is thick and gross; at the first approach of reason their minds close up like the hedgehog, and, in a word, they give one the idea of an abyss of shallowness.

To sum up their condemnation;-they are diseases of society; their souls, never large, live to feel no generous or becoming impulse; they take refuge in forms, and have all the farce of greatness without being great; they are paupers in mind; they are mere exaggerations of insignificance; they are "great" people—they are little people!(20)

"Some when they die, die all; their mould'ring clay Is but an emblem of their memories;

The space quite closes up through which they pass'd!"