I was delighted with my champion, and told him merrily that he was very right, and I would take care how I repined again. “Believe me,” continued he, “that you, who seem to have been brought up in the school of nature and reason, have little idea how widely what is called the world, departs from both. It is not enough now-a-days to furnish your house, and adorn your person according to a received rule, you must eat, drink, sleep, think, or not think, fashionably. You must be of one consent in sickness as in health; if indisposed, you must be _fashionably_ indisposed, and as fashionably cured. Four or five years ago every body of any pretension was afflicted by determination of blood to the head, and hence, lancet, leeches, and cupping, were in wonderful activity. The head is now entirely out of fashion, except amongst the dandies and phrenologists, and the stomach takes precedence of every other topic, in a well organized society. As you are young, and have not perhaps made your _debut_, I will give you a hint or two to prepare you for _good company_. Young ladies of your age, play, sing, waltz, and dress; talk of Der Freischütz, Weber, and Pasta; laugh a great deal when there is nothing to laugh at, which shews ability, for _any_ one could be merry if a _subject_ were allowed, and are silly, envious, and unfeeling _ad libitum_. Young gentlemen of my friend Mr. Johnson’s age, ride, fight, row, play whist, hunt, fish, shoot, and talk nonsense; occasionally dancing and flirting, as the necessity of circumstances may require; but by no means spoiling your sex, by paying any of those polite attentions which might lead to insubordination, the more alarming, as were your masters to lose any thing of their presumed superiority, they might be ill prepared to recover the lapse of power, unless by a barbarous appeal to physical strength. The _matron_ class you will find as well as the well-bred men of a _certain standing_, eating mutton chops, at intervals, to the amount of a certain number of ounces, with which no mixture of liquid is permitted, from eight o’clock in the morning till the same hour in the evening. You will see them likewise swallowing white mustard-seed by wholesale, and swearing to its sovereign efficacy in every possible disorder of the human frame. It will naturally suggest itself to you, that any demand upon the _brains_ would be unreasonable, now that the casket which contains them is less carefully attended to than before, and therefore, as an act of justice, fashion very equitably dispenses altogether with the presence of intellect, which is enjoying a long vacation.” I love this old man for his good humour and good sense; and, more than for either, because his sallies excessively diverted the invalid left in my charge by the rest of the party, who had gone to return a visit at some distance from Marsden, and who came back before Mr. Bolton had taken his departure.