,
And buried my mind in profound cogitation.

O Fashion, thou tyrant! adored as a god,
By such as obey thy imperious nod--
How mortals their 'sweet independence' resign,
When all that is precious they bring to thy shrine!
Thy altar they grace with the fruit of their lives,
Themselves and their fortunes, till nothing survives
To prove to the world that they ever were free;--
Their souls and their bodies they offer to thee.
And thou! how unworthy thou art of their trust!
Thou givest them nought but a damnable lust
Of silly, deceitful, contemptible show--
A lust that is stronger as older they grow.
For this they surrender their faith and their truth,
The artless, ingenuous goodness of youth,
The strength that belongs to maturity's years:
Exchanging their peace for the paltriest fears,
Lest something, they happen to do or to say,
Should not be considered exactly _au fait_;
Or lest their attempts should be wholly surpassed
By others who claim to belong to their _caste_.
Thy fiat, O Fashion, their questions decides;
Thy wisdom all needed direction provides
For spending their time in genteel dissipations,
For cutting their garments, and--poorer relations.
Controlled by thy will, they select their society;
Thou art their instructor in manners and piety.
And thus they obey the decrees of a power,
To which, in a servile allegiance, they cower--
A power that binds them in thraldom, and then
Makes puppets of women and puppies of men.

Reflections like these were absorbing my mind,
As I sat on the sofa, or partly reclined,
While promiscuous edibles recently 'bolted,'
In assiduous dancing were carelessly jolted.

The people about me my senses would strike,
In spite of the facts, as extremely alike;--
In physical aspect dyspeptic or bilious,
In manners affected, or quite supercilious,
In mind, rather flippant--of false education--
In heart, scarcely worthy of recommendation.
There was clearly a lack of the highest ability,
With a splendid array of the 'purest gentility.'
Of course I was not in condition to judge,
And some would pronounce an emphatical 'fudge'
At such an opinion as mine, and would scout it,
Insisting that I 'could know nothing about it.'
To which the narrator would humbly submit--
He has written what seemed to his mind as a fit
And truthful recountment of all that he saw,
Without a regard for the gener