h
something about the inhabitants in general, of which I find it extremely
difficult to convey any idea. Compared with the English of the country,
there is apparently very little difference between them; but still there
is a difference, and of no small importance in a moral point of view.
The country peculiarity is like the bloom of the plumb, or the down of
the peach, which the fingers of infancy cannot touch without injuring;
but this felt but not describable quality of the town character, is as
the varnish which brings out more vividly the colours of a picture, and
which may be freely and even rudely handled. The women, for example,
although as chaste in principle as those of any other community, possess
none of that innocent untempted simplicity, which is more than half the
grace of virtue; many of them, and even young ones too, "in the first
freshness of their virgin beauty," speak of the conduct and vocation of
"the erring sisters of the sex," in a manner that often amazes me, and
has, in more than one instance, excited unpleasant feelings towards the
fair satirists. This moral taint, for I can consider it as nothing less,
I have heard defended, but only by men who are supposed to have had a
large experience of the world, and who, perhaps, on that account, are not
the best judges of female delicacy. "Every woman," as Pope says, "may be
at heart a rake"; but it is for the interests of the domestic affections,
which are the very elements of virtue, to cherish the notion, that women,
as they are physically more delicate than men, are also so morally.

But the absence of delicacy, the bloom of virtue, is not peculiar to the
females, it is characteristic of all the varieties of the metropolitan
mind. The artifices of the medical quacks are things of universal
ridicule; but the sin, though in a less gross form, pervades the whole of
that sinister system by which much of the superiority of this vast
metropolis is supported. The state of the periodical press, that great
organ of political instruction--the unruly tongue of liberty, strikingly
confirms the justice of this misanthropic remark.

G--- had the kindness, by way of a treat to me, to collect, the other
day, at dinner, some of the most eminent editors of the London journals.
I found them men of talent, certainly, and much more men of the world,
than "the cloistered student from his paling lamp"; but I was astonished
to find it considered, tacitly, as a sort o