gradations genius
gives a novel direction to their practices! When this island was
overrun with beasts of prey, in the shape of quadrupeds, and lawless
bipeds, the baron and the man of wealth found it necessary to shut
themselves within castellated mansions and circumvallated domains; and
hence the vulgar association between such establishments and a
presumed high rank in their occupiers. The state of the country and of
modern society renders them no longer essential to security; yet they
are maintained as the effect of a false association; and half the
stimulus of avarice would be lost without the anticipated grandeur of
a monastic establishment, buried in the centre of a wood, and cut off
from the cheerful world, and the healthful circulation of the
atmosphere, by damp and mouldering walls! It does not signify how
apparently dull, how unappropriate to fixed habits, how unvarying the
inanimate scene, how much the inmates may be visited by low fevers,
agues, rheumatisms, and pulmonary affections; the manor-house, or the
ancient monastery, which has for ages been the residence of nobility,
becomes, in consequence, the meed of wealth, and the goal of vulgar
hope, to be patiently endured, however little it may be enjoyed! Pride
will feed upon the possession; and, if that master-passion be
gratified, minor inconveniences will have little weight in making the
election.

I confess it--and I make the declaration in the humble form of a
confession, in the hope that those who think I have sinned, will be
led to forgive my error--that I could not help thinking that the
inhabitants of the humble cottages by the way-side, whose doors stood
wide open, whose children were intermingling and playing before them,
whose society is restricted by no formal reserve, whose means depend
on their industry, #WHO HAVE NOT LEISURE TO BE UNHAPPY#, who cannot
afford to stimulate their appetites so as to enfeeble themselves by
the languor of repletion, or disease themselves by the corruptions of
plethora, and who would have no wants if the bounties of nature were
not cruelly intercepted--I could not help feeling, that such
unsophisticated beings experience less care, less self-oppression,
less disease, more gaiety of heart, more grateful sympathy, and more
even of the sense of well-being, than the artificial and constrained
personages who, however amiable, and however free from the common
vices of rank and wealth, inhabit the adjacent mansions, wi