ield, appended
to a lady's bosom, would be any thing but a luxury. So, in the other
extreme, a watch should not be so small as to render the dial-plate
illegible; nor should a shoe be so tight as to lame its wearer for life.
Beauty, it has been said, should learn to suffer; and there are, I am
aware, resources in vanity, that will reconcile man, and woman too, to
martyrdom; but these resources should not be exhausted wantonly; and in
pleasure, as in economy, there is no benefit in lighting the candle at
both ends. The true philosopher extracts the greatest good out of every
thing; and fools only, as Horace has it, run into one vice in trying to
avoid another. Let not the reader, from these remarks, suppose that
their author is a morose censurer of the times; or that the least sneer
is intended against that idol of all orthodoxy "things as they are." As
a general proposition, nothing can be more true, than that whatever is
established, even in the world of fashion, is, for the time being,
wisest, discreetest, best; and, woe betide the man that flies too
directly in its face.

There is, however, one point upon which I own myself a little sore; and
in which, I do think, superfluities are carried to a somewhat vicious
excess. The point to which I allude, and I beg the patience of the
reader, is the vast increase of superfluities, which of late years have
become primary necessaries in the appointment of a well-furnished house.
Here, indeed, is a revolution; a revolution more formidable than the
French and the American emancipation put together. We all remember the
time when one tea-table, two or three card-tables, a pier glass, a small
detachment of chairs, with two armed corporals to command them, on
either side the fire-place, with a square piece of carpet in the centre
of the floor, made a very decent display in the drawing, or (as it was
then preposterously called) the dining-room. As yet, rugs for the hearth
were not; and twice a day did Betty go upon her knees to scour the
marble and uncovered slab. In the bedrooms of those days, a narrow slip
of carpet round the bed was the maximum of woollen integument allowed
for protecting the feet of the midnight wanderer from his couch; and, in
the staircases of the fairest mansions, a like slip meandered down the
centre of the flight of steps. At that time, curtains rose and fell in a
line parallel to the horizon, after the simple plan of the green
siparium of our theatres; and,