isery is
created, and more true enjoyment excluded, by the eternal fretting and
straining of this pitiful ambition, than by all the ravages of passion,
the desolations of war, or the accidents or mortality. This may appear a
strong statement; but we make it deliberately; and are deeply convinced
of its truth. The wretchedness which it produces may not be so intense;
but it is of much longer duration, and spreads over a far wider circle.
It is quite dreadful, indeed, to think what a sweep of this pest has
taken among the comforts or our prosperous population. To be though
fashionable--that is, to be thought more opulent and tasteful, and on a
footing of intimacy with a greater number of distinguished persons than
they really are, is the great and laborious pursuit of four families out
of five, the members of which are exempted from the necessity of daily
industry. In this pursuit, their time, spirits, and talents are wasted;
their tempers soured; their affections palsied; and their natural
manners and dispositions altogether sophisticated and lost.

These are the great twin scourges of the prosperous: But there are
other maladies, of no slight malignity, to which they are peculiarly
liable. One of these, arising mainly from want of more worthy
occupation, is that perpetual use of stratagem and contrivance--that
little, artful diplomacy of private life, by which the simplest and most
natural transactions are rendered complicated and difficult, and the
common business of existence made to depend on the success of plots and
counterplots. By the incessant practice of this petty policy, a habit of
duplicity and anxiety is infallibly generated, which is equally fatal to
integrity and enjoyment. We gradually come to look on others with the
distrust which we are conscious of deserving; and are insensibly formed
to sentiments of the most unamiable selfishness and suspicion. It is
needless to say, that all these elaborate artifices are worse than
useless to the person who employs them; and that the ingenious plotter
is almost always baffled and exposed by the downright honesty of some
undesigning competitor. Miss Edgeworth, in her tale of "Manoeuvring,"
has given a very complete and most entertaining representation of "the
by-paths and indirect crooked ways," by which these artful and
inefficient people generally make their way to disappointment. In the
tale, entitled "Madame de Fleury," she has given some useful examples of
the w