s, they are every thing; making difficulties about
admissions to Lilliputian Almack's."

_To have Style_.

"To _have_ style is to be always dressed to perfection, without appearing
to care about the fashion; and to take the station and precedence which
you are entitled to, without seeming to be solicitous about it. I have
seen dowagers at watering-places in a fever of anxiety about their rank
and their consequence! patronizing puppetshows, seizing conspicuous seats,
and withholding the sunshine of their smiles from commoners allied to
older nobility than their own! How I should enjoy seeing them lost in a
London crowd, where not an eye would notice their aristocracy unless they
wore their coronets on the tops of their bonnets!"

_The Popular Complaint_.

"I am afraid of catching the popular complaint: all the professedly sane
people in London are so evidently mad, that I am led to conclude that all
the supposed lunatics are in their sound senses.

"For instance, your gay people, who toil through nominal pleasures,
dressing by rule and compass, lacing, bracing, patching, painting,
plastering, penciling, curling, pinching, and all to go out and be looked
at: going from party to party in the middle of the night, pretending not
to be sleepy, suppressing each rising yawn, and trying to make the lips
smile and the eyes twinkle, and to look animated in spite of fatigue: and
all this for no earthly purpose--too old to care about lovers, and without
daughters to marry. Why should an ugly old maid of sixty-six take all
these pains, or leave her own snug fireside, if she had not a touch of the
popular complaint.

"Then your man of pleasure, risking his life at every corner in a cab,
with a restive horse; wearing all his clothes painfully tight to show off
his figure, confining his neck in a bandage, pouring liquids down his
throat, though he knows they will give him a headache, sitting up all
night shaking bits of bone together for the mere purpose of giving
somebody a chance of winning all his money, or offering bets on racehorses
to afford himself and family an opportunity of changing opulence for
beggary! He has the popular complaint of course.

"Then your man of business: your public servant, toiling, and striving and
figetting about matters of state, sacrificing health, and the snug
comforts of a private gentleman, for the sake of popularity! _His_
complaint _is_ popular indeed. Then your physician, courting extens