s
suited to such occasions, which if properly managed will be attended
with little expense, and much convenience.

_Bad habit of keeping Spare Rooms._

Though persons of large fortune may support an expensive establishment
without inconvenience, it ill becomes those in the middle rank to
imitate such an example. Nothing can be more ludicrous than the contrast
exhibited between two families of this description; the one living in
the dignified splendour, and with the liberal hospitality, that wealth
can command; the other in a stile of tinsel show, without the real
appropriate distinctions belonging to rank and fortune. They are lavish,
but not liberal, often sacrificing independence to support dissipation,
and betraying the dearest interests of society for the sake of personal
vanity, and gratifying what is significantly termed 'the pride of life.'

The great point for comfort and respectability is, that all the
household economy should be uniform, not displaying a parade of show in
one thing, and a total want of comfort in another. Besides the
contemptible appearance that this must have to every person of good
sense, it is often productive of fatal consequences. How common it is,
in large towns especially, that for the vanity of having a showy
drawing-room to receive company, the family are confined to a close back
room, where they have scarcely air or light, the want of which is
essentially injurious to health. To keep rooms for show belongs to the
higher classes, where the house is sufficiently commodious for the
family, and to admit of this also: but in private dwellings, to shut up
perhaps the only room that is fit to live in, is to be guilty of a kind
of self-destruction; and yet how frequently this consideration escapes
persons who are disposed to render their family every comfort, but they
have a grate, a carpet, and chairs too fine for every day's use. What a
reflection, when nursing a sick child, to think that it may be the
victim of a bright grate, and a fine carpet! Or, what is equally
afflicting, to see all the children perhaps rickety and diseased from
the same cause! Keeping a spare bed for ornament, rather than for use,
is often attended with similar consequences. A stranger or a friend is
allowed to occupy it once in so many months, and he does it at the peril
of his health, and even of his life.

Another bad effect of keeping spare rooms is the seeing more company,
and in a more expensive manner,