ensnare an heiress into matrimony: and so, having dragged their
gifts--their horses of the sun--into a service which shames all their
native pride and power, they sink in the mire; and their peers and
emulators exclaim that they have "made a good thing of it."

Are these the processes by which a noble race is made and perpetuated?
At Mrs. Potiphar's we heard several Pendennises longing for a similar
luxury, and announcing their firm purpose never to have wives nor houses
until they could have them as splendid as jewelled Mrs. Potiphar, and
her palace, thirty feet front. Where were their heads, and their hearts,
and their arms? How looks this craven despondency, before the stern
virtues of the ages we call dark? When a man is so voluntarily imbecile
as to regret he is not rich, if that is what he wants, before he has
struck a blow for wealth; or so dastardly as to renounce the prospect of
love, because, sitting sighing, in velvet dressing-gown and slippers, he
does not see his way clear to ten thousand a year: when young women
coiffed _à merveille_, of unexceptionable "style," who, with or without
a prospective penny, secretly look down upon honest women who struggle
for a livelihood, like noble and Christian beings, and, as such, are
rewarded; in whose society a man must forget that he has ever read,
thought, or felt; who destroy in the mind the fair ideal of woman, which
the genius of art, and poetry, and love, their inspirer has created;
then, it seems to us, it is high time that the subject should be
regarded, not as a matter of breaking butterflies upon the wheel, but as
a sad and sober question, in whose solution, all fathers and mothers,
and the state itself, are interested. When keen observers, and men of
the world, from Europe, are amazed and appalled at the giddy whirl and
frenzied rush of our society--a society singular in history for the
exaggerated prominence it assigns to wealth, irrespective of the talents
that amassed it, they and their possessor being usually hustled out of