"Well, really,--I would rather never be spoken to than be seen with
such a man as that!"

Poor butterflies! Bright wings do not always bring happiness. "She
that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth." The revelations
of high life that come to the challenge and the fight are only the
occasional croppings out of disquietudes that are, underneath, like
the stars of heaven for multitude, but like the demons of the pit for
hate. 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