senseless show upon these same young men and women? We can easily
discover. It saps their noble ambition, assails their health, lowers
their estimate of men and their reverence for women, cherishes an
eager and aimless rivalry, weakens true feeling, wipes away the bloom
of true modesty, and induces an ennui, a satiety, and a kind of
dilettante misanthropy, which is only the more monstrous because it is
undoubtedly real. You shall hear young men of intelligence and
cultivation, to whom the unprecedented circumstances of this country
offer opportunities of a great and beneficent career, complaining that
they were born within this blighted circle--regretting that they were
not bakers and tallow-chandlers, and under no obligation to keep up
appearances--deliberately surrendering all the golden possibilities of
that Future which this country, beyond all others, holds before
them--sighing that they are not rich enough to marry the girls they
love, and bitterly upbraiding fortune that they are not
millionnaires--suffering the vigor of their years to exhale in idle
wishes and pointless regrets--disgracing their manhood by lying in
wait behind their "so gentlemanly" and "aristocratic" manners, until
they can pounce upon a "fortune" and ensnare an heiress into
matrimony: and so having dragged their gifts, their horses of the sun,
into a service which shames out of them 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