"When we think of those mighty resources we have just been adverting to, the strength all such tastes acquire by sympathy, and the observation of nature and of human life they tend to excite, we might expect they would furnish society with everlasting sources of excitement and mutual interest, that they would create a universal sympathy with genius and ability wherever it was found, and soften the repulsive austerity with which it is the nature of rank and wealth to look on humble fortunes. "Little or nothing of all this takes place. Frivolity and insipidity are the prevailing characters of conversation; and nowhere in Europe, perhaps, does difference of fortune or station produce more unsocial and illiberal separation. Very few of those whom fortune has released from the necessity of following some laborious profession, are capable of passing their time agreeably without the assistance of company; not from a spirit of gaiety which calls on society for indulgence--not from any pleasure they take in conversation, where they are frequently languid and taciturn, but to rival each other in the luxury of the table, or, by a great _variety of indescribable airs_, to make others _feel the pain of mortification_. They meet as if _'to fight the boundaries' of their rank and fashion_, and the less definite and perceptible is the line which divides them, the more punctilious is their pride. It is a great mistake to suppose that this low-minded folly is peculiar to people of rank: it is an English disease. But the higher we go in society, the wider the circle of the excluded becomes, consequently, the greater the range of human beings cast forth from the pale of sympathy; and the more contracted do the judgment, experience, and feelings of its inmates become. The lofty walls, the iron spikes that surround our villas, and the notices every where affixed 'that trespassers will be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law,' are meet emblems of the social spirit that connects the different orders of society in England. The effect of this is to produce narrow minds, or, what is worse, narrow hearts on one side, and a host of dissocial, irritable passions on the other. In each step of the scale, those beneath see chiefly the unamiable qualities of their superiors."