The goods of fortune, the baits of power, the indulgences of vanity, may be accumulated without end, and the taste for them increases as it is gratified: the love of virtue, the pursuit of truth, grow stale and dull in the dissipation of a court. Virtue is thought crabbed and morose, knowledge pedantic, while every sense is pampered, and every folly tolerated. Every thing tends naturally to personal aggrandisement and unrestrained self-will. It is easier for monarchs as well as other men ‘to tread the primrose path of dalliance’ than ‘to scale the steep and thorny road to heaven.’ The vices, when they have leave from power and authority, go greater lengths than the virtues; example justifies almost every excess, and ‘nice customs curtsey to great kings.’ What chance is there that monarchs should not yield to the temptations of gallantry there, where youth and beauty are as wax? What female heart can indeed withstand the attractions of a throne—the smile that melts all hearts, the air that awes rebellion, the frown that kings dread, the hand that scatters fairy wealth, that bestows titles, places, honour, power, the breast on which the star glitters, the head circled with a diadem, whose dress dazzles with its richness and its taste, who has nations at his command, senates at his controul, ‘in form and motion so express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a God; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!’ The power of resistance is so much the less, where fashion extends impunity to the frail offender, and screens the loss of character. ‘Vice is undone, if she forgets her birth, And stoops from angels to the dregs of earth; But ’tis the fall degrades her to a whore: Let greatness own her, and she’s mean no more. Her birth, her beauty, crowds and courts confess, Chaste matrons praise her, and grave bishops bless. In golden chains the willing world she draws, And hers the Gospel is, and hers the laws.’[46]