But God forbid that a word should escape from us which should seem to place the amusements of society, or the charms of conversation, in competition with those stern virtues which are the guardians of an English hearth! The austere fanaticism of the Puritans, tainted with hypocrisy as it was, was preferable a thousand times to the orgies of the Regent and the _Parc-aux-Cerfs_. If purity and refined society be, indeed, incompatible--if the love of freedom and active enterprise necessarily exclude the grace and softness which lessen, or at least teach us to forget, the burden of existence, let us be what we are; and, indeed, it is the opinion of many, that the rant of social pleasure is the price we pay for the excellence of our political institutions. It is because before the law all men are equal, that in the world so much care is taken to show that they are different. If to this we add the mercantile habits of our countrymen, the enormous wealth which their pursuits enable them to accumulate--the great honours which are the reward of successful industry and ambition--the absurd value annexed to technical distinctions--the manner in which, in our as in all free countries, those distinctions are conferred--and a certain disposition to sneer at any chivalrous, or elevated feeling, from which few of our ladies are exempt--we shall find it easy to account for the cold, stiff, ungraceful, harsh, and mercenary habits which disfigure, to the astonishment of all foreigners, the patrician class of English society. Nothing, indeed, can be less graceful than the frivolity of an Englishman. Naturally grave, serious, contemplative, if his angry stars have endowed him with enormous wealth, he carries into the pursuit of trifles the same solemnity and perseverance which, had he been more fortunately situated, would have been employed in a professional career--he carries a certain degree of gravity into his follies and his vices; as Pope, no less keen an observer than finished a poet, observed, he "Judicious sups, and greatly daring dines"--