furnish them with all the luxurious devices of Parisian genius; to
give superb banquets, at which your guests laugh, and which make you
miserable; to drive a fine carriage and ape European liveries, and
crests, and coats-of-arms; to resent the friendly advances of your
baker's wife, and the lady of your butcher (you being yourself a
cobbler's daughter); to talk much of the "old families" and of your
aristocratic foreign friends; to despise labor; to prate of "good
society"; to travesty and parody, in every conceivable way, a society
which we know only in books and by the superficial observation of
foreign travel, which arises out of a social organization entirely
unknown to us, and which is opposed to our fundamental and essential
principles; if all this were fine, what a prodigiously fine society
would ours be!

This occurred to us upon lately receiving a card of invitation to a
brilliant ball. We were quietly ruminating over our evening fire, with
Disraeli's Wellington speech, "all tears," in our hands, with the
account of a great man's burial, and a little man's triumph across the
channel. So many great men gone, we mused, and such great crises
impending! This democratic movement in Europe; Kossuth and Mazzini
waiting for the moment to give the word; the Russian bear watchfully
sucking his paws; the Napoleonic empire redivivus; Cuba, and annexation,
and Slavery; California and Australia, and the consequent considerations
of political economy; dear me! exclaimed we, putting on a fresh hodful
of coal, we must look a little into the state of parties.

As we put down the coal-scuttle, there was a knock at the door. We said,
"come in," and in came a neat Alhambra-watered envelope, containing the
announcement that the queen of fashion was "at home" that evening week.
Later in the evening, came a friend to smoke a cigar. The card was lying
upon the table, and he read it with eagerness. "You'll go, of course,"
said he, "for you will meet all the 'best society.'"

Shall we, truly? Shall we really see the "best society of the city," the
picked flower of its genius, character and beauty? What makes the "best
society" of men and women? The noblest specimens of each, of course. The
men who mould the time, who refresh our faith in heroism and virtue, who
make Plato, and Zeno, and Shakespeare, and all Shakespeare's gentlemen,
possible again. The women, whose beauty, and sweetness, and dignity, and
high accomplishment, and grace,