This passion for diversions renders the _Sunday_ particularly irksome to persons of any sort of _ton_ in the Fashionable World. A dose of piety in the morning is well enough, though it is somewhat inconvenient to take it quite so early; but then it wants an opera, or a play, or a dance, to carry it off. There are indeed some _esprit-forts_ among the ladies, who are trying with no little success to redeem a portion of the Sabbath from the insufferable bondage of the Bible and the sermon-book; and to naturalize that continental distribution of the day, which gives the morning to devotion, and the evening to dissipation. It is but justice to the gentlemen to say, that they discover no backwardness in supporting a measure so consonant to all their wishes. It is therefore not impossible that some considerable changes in this respect may soon be brought about. That good-humoured legislature which has allowed a Sunday newspaper, {116} will perhaps not always refuse a Sunday opera, or play. People of Fashion will then no longer have to torture their invention for expedients to supply the absence of their diurnal diversions. They may then let their tradesmen go quietly to their parish-churches, instead of sending for them to wear away the sabbath-hours in some supervacaneous employment. In short, Sunday may be set at liberty from its primitive bondage, and exhibit as happy a union of morning solemnity and evening licentiousness, as it has ever displayed among the dissolute adherents of Fashionable Christianity. But to return:—The rage for amusements {119} is so strong in this people, that it seems to supersede all exercise of judgment in the choice and the conduct of them. To go every where, see every thing, and know every body, are, in their estimation, objects of such importance, that, in order to accomplish them, they subject themselves to the greatest inconveniences, and commit the very grossest absurdities. Hence they will rush in crowds, to shine where they cannot be seen, to dance where they cannot move, and to converse with friends whom they cannot approach; and, what is more, though they cannot breathe for the pressure, and can scarcely live for the heat, yet they call this—enjoyment.