found it frivolous, vain, and even dull. She craved sympathy and
intellectual conversation and knowledge. She found neither at a
fashionable party, only outside show, gay dresses, and unspeakable
follies,--no conversation; for how could there be either the cultivation
of friendship or conversation in a crowd, perchance, of empty people for
the most part? "As to London," says she, "I shall be glad to get out of
it; everything is great and vast and late and magnificent and dull." I
very seldom go to these parties, and I always repent when I do. My
distaste of these scenes of insipid magnificence I have not words to
tell. Every faculty but the sight is starved, and that has a surfeit. I
like conversation parties of the right sort, whether of four persons or
forty; but it is impossible to talk when two or three hundred people are
continually coming in and popping out, or nailing themselves to a card
table. "Conceive," said she, "of the insipidity of two or three hundred
people,--all dressed in the extremity of fashion, painted as red as
bacchanals, poisoning the air with perfumes, treading on each other's
dresses, not one in ten able to get a chair when fainting with
weariness. I never now go to these things when I can possibly avoid it,
and stay when there as few minutes as I can." Thus she wrote as early as
1782. She went through the same experience as did Madame Récamier,
learning to prefer a small and select circle, where conversation was the
chief charm, especially when this circle was composed only of gifted men
and women. In this incipient disgust of gay and worldly society--chiefly
because it improved neither her mind nor her morals, because it was
stupid and dull, as it generally is to people of real culture and high
intelligence--she seems to have been gradually drawn to the learned
prelates of the English Church,--like Dr. Porteus, Bishop of Chester,
afterwards of London; the Bishop of St. Asaph; and Dr. Home, then Dean
of Canterbury. She became very intimate with Wilberforce and Rev. John
Newton, while she did not give up her friendship for Horace Walpole,