one sex seeks the society of the other, we condemn our youth to
the company of such. Paterfamilias is afraid the young men will pay
attention to his daughters. Perhaps the young lady-daughters fancy it to
be beneath them to be civil to their father's young men. Perhaps the
young men themselves believe that an honourable connexion is beyond their
means, and deliberately pursue a career of vice. In all these cases, in
my humble opinion, very serious blunders are involved. The life of a
bachelor under the circumstances I here allude to is quite as costly as
that of a married man, without the stimulus to exertion which the latter
has. Paterfamilias forgets that the young man he fears may be the suitor
for his daughter's hand, though he is poor to-day, may be comparatively
rich to-morrow; and the young ladies should remember that it is rather
too much to expect that a young man just entering upon life will be able
to launch out in the same style as those who for thirty or forty years
have been pursuing a successful commercial career. It is our false pride
that eats us up,--that makes us sneer at love in a cottage,--that turns
our women into cross old maids, and our men into gay Lotharios, very
disreputable and, to a certain extent, deliriously gay. I admit that we
have much more outside respectability, but is society the better? Have
we more true happiness? If Wordsworth is correct, "plain living and high
thinking" go together. But our aim is high living, and I fear the
thinking is very, very plain in consequence. We nurse up in our midst,
and reverently worship--and denounce as worse than an infidel every one
who utters the truth respecting it--an aristocracy the richest and most
luxurious in the world,--an aristocracy which would long ere this have
become intellectually effete, did it not recruit its ranks from
successful adventurers in the shape of lawyers; and the commercial
classes vying with this aristocracy in outward show, the effects are
manifest all over the land, in the general attempts to live beyond one's
means, and to get into a circle supposed to be superior to that in which
originally we moved. In Germany they manage better; the noble and the
trading classes never have a rivalry, the gulf is impassable, and hence
the home life is less pretentious and happier than ours. In England "the
toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his
kibe." What we want is a return to the pl