comfortable English homes, turning our parlours into "boudoirs," ripping
our fragrant patches of roses into fantastic "parterres," covering our
centre tables with albums and wax flowers, and, in short (for these
details pain us), stripping our nooks and corners of the welcome warm air
of pleasant homeliness, which was wont to be a charm and a privilege, to
substitute for it a chilly gloss--an unwholesome straining after effect--a
something less definite in its operation than in its result, which is
called--gentility.

To have done with simile. Our matrons have discovered that luxury is
specifically cheaper than comfort (and they regard them as independent, if
not incompatible terms); and more than this, that comfort is, after all,
but an irrelevant and dispensable corollary to gentility, while luxury is
its main prop and stay. Furthermore, that improvidence is a virtue of such
lustre, that itself or its likeness is essential to the very existence of
respectability; and, by carrying out this proposition, that in order to
make the least amount of extravagance produce the utmost admiration and
envy, it is desirable to be improvident as publicly as possible; the means
for such expenditure being gleaned from retrenchments in the home
department. Thus, by a system of domestic alchemy, the education of the
children is resolved into a vehicle; a couple of maids are amalgamated
into a man in livery; while to a single drudge, superintended and aided by
the mistress and elder girls, is confided the economy of the pantry, from
whose meagre shelves are supplied supplementary blondes and kalydors.

Now a system of economy which can induce a mother to "bring up her
children at home," while she regards a phaeton as absolutely necessary to
convey her to church and to her tradespeople, and an annual visit to the
sea-side as perfectly indispensable to restore the faded complexions of
Frances and Jemima, ruined by late hours and hot cream, may be considered