To Dissipation’s playful eye, Such is the life for man; And they that halt, and they that fly, Should have no other plan: Alike the busy and the gay Should sport all night till break of day, In Fashion’s varying colours drest; Till seiz’d for debt through rude mischance, Or chill’d by age, they leave the dance, In gaol or dust—to rest. V. Methinks I hear, in accents low, Some sober quiz reply, Poor child of Folly! what art thou? A Bond-Street Butterfly! Thy choice nor Health nor Nature greets, No taste hast thou of vernal sweets, Enslav’d by noise, and dress, and play: Ere thou art to the country flown, The sun will scorch, the Spring be gone,— Then leave the town in May. CHAP. VII. HAPPINESS OF THE PEOPLE ESTIMATED. I TRUST my reader is by this time sufficiently acquainted with the general outline of Fashionable life: it would only be accumulating observations unnecessarily to enter further into the subject: I shall therefore devote the present chapter to a brief investigation of the state of happiness among a people who, it must be observed, claim to be considered—the _happiest of their species_. Happiness is, as moralists agree, a relative expression; and indicates the excess of the aggregate of good over that of evil in any given condition. The foundation of happiness therefore must be traced to the ideas which those, upon whose condition the question turns, are accustomed to entertain, of good and evil. So that if we wished to ascertain the amount of happiness in a life of Fashion, we must make our calculation out of those things, which constitute respectively good and evil in a Fashionable estimation. I have had occasion to observe before, that a Fashionable life is a life of sense; consequently all the sources of happiness in such a condition must be confined to the pleasures of sense. Now, it must be considered, that the pains of sense are at least as numerous as its pleasures; and that, by a law of Providence subject to very few exceptions, those who will have the one, must take their proportion of the other with them.