acquainted with the faults of his servants, and (what is worse) with
the merits of his children.

A dinner of ceremony is a funeral without a legacy; an assembly is a
mob, and a ball a compound of glare, tinsel, noise, and dust. However
amusing in their freshness, after a few repetitions, they are only
rendered endurable by the prospect of some collateral gain, or the
gratification of personal vanity. To exhibit the beauty of a young wife,
or the diamonds of an old one; to be able to say the best thing that is
uttered; to sport a red ribbon or a Waterloo medal in their first
novelty; to carry a point with a great man, or to borrow money from a
rich one, may pass off an evening very well, with those who happen to be
interested in such speculations; but, these things apart, the arrantest
trifler in the circle must get weary at last, and be heartily rejoiced
when the conclusion of the season spares him all further reiteration of
the mill-horse operation. It is this insipidity of society that forces
so many of its members upon desperate adventures of gallantry, and upon
deep play. Any thing, every thing is good to escape from the languor and
listlessness of a converse from which whatever interests is banished.
Many a woman loses her character, and many a man incurs a verdict of
ruinous damages, in the simple search of that rarest of all rare things
in society--a sensation. Neither is the matter much mended, if, barring
the insipidity of bon-ton company, you plunge into the formal gravity of
the middle classes, or into the noisy, empty mirth of the lower. The man
of sense and feeling, wherever he goes, will find himself in a minority,
in which few will speak his language or comprehend his ideas. He will
seldom return to his home without a weary sense of the "stale, flat, and
unprofitable" nothings he has been compelled to entertain in his
intercourse with the world,--without the recollection of some outrage on
his independence, some dogmatism that he dared not question, some