Blue-Stocking Hall, (Vol. 2 of 3)Scargill, William Pitt
General
Blue-Stocking Hall, (Vol. 2 of 3)
Scargill, William Pitt
Epistolary fiction; Women -- Conduct of life -- Fiction; Women -- Education -- Fiction
A mile farther off, we have the Henleys; excellent people, who are
from morning till night engaged in doing good. They are rich and
bountiful, friendly and good-humoured, but so strict, and so devoted
to the _letter_ of their particular sect, that if you agreed to
travel with them over a line which had been divided into a hundred
distinct measures, of a cubit length in each, and that after performing
ninety-nine steps in the series, you were to stop at the hundredth,
your former task would go for nothing, and you would be as completely
distanced as if you had never attempted to walk the course. These good
people are anxious in the greatest degree to enlist my young folks,
and like the nuns think it no harm to employ every art of affectionate
inveiglement to persuade them into an adoption of a certain distinctive
phraseology, and _form_ of thinking which I do not like, and therefore
shall endeavour to avoid without wishing to repel the kind fellowship
which is proffered, though I conclude that _our_ religion will be at
once condemned, when it is discovered that I do not disapprove of many
things which are proscribed at the Priory. I heard it rumoured the
other day, that I am considered one of the _pie-bald_ race. What am I
to do?
Well, a third description of neighbour, and by much the most numerous,
I find planted in three or four pretty places at no great distance from
Checkley. There is a family of Liner, another of Peachum, and others
whose names I need not plague you by calling over, who with competent
fortunes enjoy all the comfort of life which money can bestow, and
feel all the title to consideration which belongs to independence;
_but_ who are so intolerably dull, unimproving, and self-complacent, so
vulgar too in a perpetual rivalry of fine dinners, fine furniture, and
fine dress, which have not even the stamp of fashion to recommend them,
that my mind revolts against introducing my nieces into such a society
as they form.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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