combinations and conspiracies against good morals and good manners. There
is commonly, in young people, a facility that makes them unwilling to
refuse anything that is asked of them; a 'mauvaise honte' that makes them
ashamed to refuse; and, at the same time, an ambition of pleasing and
shining in the company they keep: these several causes produce the best
effect in good company, but the very worst in bad. If people had no vices
but their own, few would have so many as they have. For my own part, I
would sooner wear other people's clothes than their vices; and they would
sit upon me just as well. I hope you will have none; but if ever you
have, I beg, at least, they may be all your own. Vices of adoption are,
of all others, the most disgraceful and unpardonable. There are degrees
in vices, as well as in virtues; and I must do my countrymen the justice
to say, that they generally take their vices in the lower degree. Their
gallantry is the infamous mean debauchery of stews, justly attended and
rewarded by the loss of their health, as well as their character. Their
pleasures of the table end in beastly drunkenness, low riot, broken
windows, and very often (as they well deserve), broken bones. They game
for the sake of the vice, not of the amusement; and therefore carry it to
excess; undo, or are undone by their companions. By such conduct, and in
such company abroad, they come home, the unimproved, illiberal, and
ungentlemanlike creatures that one daily sees them, that is, in the park
and in the streets, for one never meets them in good company; where they
have neither manners to present themselves, nor merit to be received.
But, with the manners of footmen and grooms, they assume their dress too;
for you must have observed them in the streets here, in dirty blue
frocks, with oaken sticks in their ends, and their hair greasy and
unpowdered, tucked up under their hats of an enormous size. Thus finished
and adorned by their travels, they become the disturbers of play-houses;
they break the windows, and commonly the landlords, of the taverns where
they drink; and are at once the support, the terror, and the victims, of