ungraceful, harsh, and mercenary habits which disfigure, to the
astonishment of all foreigners, the patrician class of English society.
Nothing, indeed, can be less graceful than the frivolity of an Englishman.
Naturally grave, serious, contemplative, if his angry stars have endowed
him with enormous wealth, he carries into the pursuit of trifles the same
solemnity and perseverance which, had he been more fortunately situated,
would have been employed in a professional career--he carries a certain
degree of gravity into his follies and his vices; as Pope, no less keen an
observer than finished a poet, observed, he

"Judicious sups, and greatly daring dines"--

devotes himself to an eternal round of puerile follies, with a pompous
self-importance that would be ludicrous were it exhibited in the discharge
of the noblest and most sacred duties. Plate and wine seem his religion,
and a well-furnished room his morality--his dinners engross his
thoughts--his field sports are a nation's care. He writes books on
arm-chairs, hunts with the most ineffable self-sufficiency, and talks of
his dogs and horses as Howard or Clarkson might speak of the jails they
had visited, and the mourners they had set free. He commits errors with a
stolid air of deliberation, which the reckless passions of boiling youth
could hardly palliate, but which, when perpetrated as a title to fashion,
and as a passport to society, no epithets that contempt can suggest are
vehement enough to stigmatize. The Englishman's vice has a business-like
air with it that is intolerable--there is no illusion, no refinement--it
is coarse, direct, groveling brutality--it wears its own hideous aspect
with no garnish or disguise; and how seldom, even among that sex which
these volumes are intended to instruct, does the brow wreathed with
roses, amid the haunts of dissipation, wear a gay, a serene, or even a
contented aspect! Where all the treasures that inanimate nature can
furnish are scattered in profusion--where the air is fragrant with
perfume, and vocal with melody, how vainly do we look for the freshness
and animation, and the simplicity and single-mindedness of buoyant and
delighted youth! We feel inclined, amid this gloomy dissipation and
depressing pleasure, to reverse the most beautiful passage in Euripides,
and to say, that the banquet and the festival do require all the
heightening of art, all the embellishments of luxury, all the illusions
of song, to conc