eal the struggles of corroding interest, and the pangs of
constant mortification.

"There" (but we quote one of the most remarkable passages in the
book) "is a general aversion from the labour of thought, in all
who have not had the faculties exercised while they were pliant,
nor been supplied with a certain stock of elementary knowledge,
essential alike to any subject of science that may be presented
to their maturer years. By means of the press, many broken and
ill-sustained rays pierce across the neglect or indifference of
parents, to the minds of the young. Gleams of a rational spirit
and enlarged feeling may often be found among the daughters of
country gentlemen, whose sons are still solely devoted to
sporting and party politics.

"When we think of those mighty resources we have just been
adverting to, the strength all such tastes acquire by sympathy,
and the observation of nature and of human life they tend to
excite, we might expect they would furnish society with
everlasting sources of excitement and mutual interest, that they
would create a universal sympathy with genius and ability
wherever it was found, and soften the repulsive austerity with
which it is the nature of rank and wealth to look on humble
fortunes.

"Little or nothing of all this takes place. Frivolity and
insipidity are the prevailing characters of conversation; and
nowhere in Europe, perhaps, does difference of fortune or station
produce more unsocial and illiberal separation. Very few of those
whom fortune has released from the necessity of following some
laborious profession, are capable of passing their time agreeably
without the assistance of company; not from a spirit of gaiety
which calls on society for indulgence--not from any pleasure they
take in conversation, where they are frequently languid and
taciturn, but to rival each other in the luxury of the table, or,
by a great _variety of indescribable airs_, to make others _feel
the pain of mortification_. They meet as if _'to fight the
boundaries' of their rank and fashion_, and the less definite and
perceptible is the line which divides them, the more punctilious
is their pride. It is a great mistake to suppose that this
low-minded folly is peculiar to people of rank: it is an English
disease. But the higher we go in society, the wider