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 _a merveille_, of
unexceptionable "style," who, with or without a prospective penny,
secretly look down upon honest women who struggle for their
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 sight--is it not quite time to ponder a
little upon the Court of Louis XIV., and the "merrie days" of King
Charles II.? Is it not clear that, if what our good wag, with caustic
irony, called "best society," were really such, every thoughtful man
would read upon Mrs. Potiphar's softly-tinted walls, the terrible
"mene, mene" of imminent destruction?

Venice in her purple prime of luxury, when the famous law was passed,
making all gondolas black, that the nobles should not squander
fortunes upon them, was not more luxurious than New York today. Our