specimen of Young America dares have his trousers loose or wear straps
to them? We want individuality, heroism, and, if necessary, an
uncompromising persistence in difference.

This is the present state of parties. They are wildly extravagant, full
of senseless display; they are avoided by the pleasant and intelligent,
and swarm with reckless regiments of "Brown's men." The ends of the
earth contribute their choicest products to the supper, and there is
everything that wealth can purchase, and all the spacious splendor that
thirty feet front can afford. They are hot, and crowded, and glaring.
There is a little weak scandal, venomous, not witty, and a stream of
weary platitude, mortifying to every sensible person. Will any of our
Pendennis friends intermit their indignation for a moment, and consider
how many good things they have said or heard during the season? If Mr.
Potiphar's eyes should chance to fall here, will he reckon the amount of
satisfaction and enjoyment he derived from Mrs. Potiphar's ball, and
will that lady candidly confess what she gained from it beside weariness
and disgust? What eloquent sermons we remember to have heard in which
the sins and the sinners of Babylon, Jericho and Gomorrah were scathed
with holy indignation. The cloth is very hard upon Cain, and completely
routs the erring kings of Judah. The Spanish Inquisition, too, gets
frightful knocks, and there is much eloquent exhortation to preach the
gospel in the interior of Siam. Let it be preached there and God speed
the Word. But also let us have a text or two in Broadway and the Avenue.

The best sermon ever preached upon society, within our knowledge, is
_Vanity Fair_. Is the spirit of that story less true of New York than of
London? Probably we never see Amelia at our parties, nor Lieutenant
George Osborne, nor good gawky Dobbin, nor Mrs. Rebecca Sharp Crawley,
nor old Steyne. We are very much pained, of course, that any author