te. The misery that to-night in the cellar cuddles up in the straw
is not so utter as the princely disquietude which stalks through
splendid drawing-rooms, brooding over the slights and offences of high
life. The bitterness of trouble seems not so unfitting, when drunk
out of a pewter mug, as when it pours from the chased lips of a golden
chalice. In the sharp crack of the voluptuary's pistol, putting an
end to his earthly misery, I hear the confirmation that in a hollow,
fastidious life there is no peace.

Again: Excessive devotion to fashion is productive of physical
disease, mental imbecility, and spiritual withering.

Apparel insufficient to keep out the cold and the rain, or so fitted
upon the person that the functions of life are restrained; late hours,
filled with excitement and feasting; free draughts of wine, that make
one not beastly intoxicated, but only fashionably drunk; and luxurious
indolence--are the instruments by which this unreal life pushes its
disciples into valetudinarianism and the grave. Along the walks
of high life Death goes a mowing--and such harvests as are reaped!
_Materia medica_ has been exhausted to find curatives for these
physiological devastations. Dropsies, cancers, consumptions, gout, and
almost every infirmity in all the realm of pathology, have been the
penalty paid. To counteract the damage, pharmacy has gone forth with
medicament, panacea, elixir, embrocation, salve, and cataplasm.

To-night, with swollen feet, upon cushioned ottoman, and groaning
with aches innumerable, is the votary of luxurious living, not half so
happy as his groom or coal-heaver.

Fashion is the world's undertaker, and drives thousands of hearses to
Laurel Hill and Greenwood.

But, worse than that, this folly is an intellectual depletion. This
endless study of proprieties and etiquette, patterns and styles, is
bedwarfing to the intellect. I never knew a man or a woman of extreme
fashion that knew much. How belittling the study of the cut of a coat,
or the tie of a cravat, or the wrinkle in a shoe, or the color of a
ribbon! How they are worried if something gets untied, or hangs awry,
or is not nicely adjusted! With a mind capable of measuring the
height and depth of great subjects; able to unravel mysteries; to
walk through the universe; to soar up into the infinity of God's
attributes,--hovering perpetually over a new style of mantilla! I have
known men, reckless as to their character, and regardless o