Suggestive indeed that at the swellest of all swell affairs in the American metropolis there should appear, according to the press dispatches, "ten Mme. de Pompadours, eight Mme. de Maintenons, four Mme. de la Vallieres, and three Catherines of Russia." Good God! Has our "best society" come to such a pass that its proudest ladies delight to personate notorious prostitutes?" There was no Racine or Moliere, no Charlotte Corday or Mme. de Stael"--the men posed as profligate kings, the women as courtesans! Yet in that same city young Mr. Seeley is arrested for looking at a naked dancing-girl, and "Little Egypt" has to "cut it" when she hears the cops! And what is the difference, pray, between a Pompadour and a Five Points nymph du pave? Simply this: The one rustles in silks for diamonds, the other hustles in rags for bread, their occupation being identical. New York was Tory even in Revolutionary times. From its very foundation it has been at the feet of royalty and mouthing of "divine right." It is ever making itself an obtuse triangle before the god of its idolatry--its knees and nose on the earth, its tail-feathers in the air; but we had yet to learn that it considered "that divinity which doth behedge a king" capable of sanctifying a woman's shame, transforming a foul leman into an angel of light! Catherine of Russia was an able woman, but a notorious harlot, foul as Milton's portress of Hell; a woman who, as Byron informs us, loved all he-things except her husband. Is that why the masqueraders preferred the character of Empress Catherine to that of Martha Washington? Did they consider it more in keeping with the company? Strange that each Russian empress was not attended by a few of her favorite grenadiers, with "the fair- faced Lanskoi," her boy-lover, thrown in as lagniappe. More than one hundred Louis XVths and only ten Pompadours! What a pity! But we may presume that each Pompadour, like the frail original, was "in herself a host"! Eight Maintenons, four Vallieres, and only one Louis XIVth present to look after his personal property! How proud a genuine American gentleman--one untainted with royalist fever--would have felt to see his wife or daughter posing as the leman of Lanskoi, of Louis XVth, or le Grande Monarque--of whom Three-Eyed Billy of England once said that he selected young men for his ministers and corrupt old cats for his mistresses!