productive but of slight interest; that all we
can aspire to is, to trace a brilliant picture of brilliant manners;
and that when the dance and the festival have been duly inspired by the
repartee and the sarcasm, and the gem, the robe, and the plume adroitly
lighted up by the lamp and the lustre, our cunning is exhausted. And so
your novelist generally twists this golden thread with some substantial
silken cord, for use, and works up, with the light dance, and with the
heavy dinner, some secret marriage, and some shrouded murder. And thus,
by English plots and German mysteries, the page trots on, or jolts,
till, in the end, Justice will have her way, and the three volumes are
completed.

A plan both good and antique, and also popular, but not our way. We
prefer trusting to the slender incidents which spring from out our
common intercourse. There is no doubt that that great pumice-stone,
Society, smooths down the edges of your thoughts and manners. Bodies of
men who pursue the same object must ever resemble each other: the life
of the majority must ever be imitation. Thought is a labour to which few
are competent; and truth requires for its development as much courage as
acuteness. So conduct becomes conventional, and opinion is a legend; and
thus all men act and think alike.

But this is not peculiar to what is called fashionable life, it is
peculiar to civilisation, which gives the passions less to work upon.
Mankind are not more heartless because they are clothed in ermine; it is
that their costume attracts us to their characters, and we stare because
we find the prince or the peeress neither a conqueror nor a heroine. The
great majority of human beings in a country like England glides through
existence in perfect ignorance of their natures, so complicated and so
controlling is the machinery of our social life! Few can break the bonds
that tie them down, and struggle for self-knowledge; fewer, when
the talisman is gained, can direct their illuminated energies to the
purposes with which they sympathise.

A mode of life which encloses in its circle all the dark and deep
results of unbounded indulgence, however it may appear to some who
glance over the sparkling surface, does not exactly seem to us one
either insipid or uninteresting to the moral speculator; and, indeed, we
have long been induced to suspect that the seeds of true sublimity lurk
in a life which, like this book, is half fashion and half passion.

We k