The art of printing is
seriously presumed to have been invented only for "some banished lover,
or some captive maid." Flirtation is the grand business of life. The
maiden flirts from the nursery, the married woman flirts from the altar.
The widow adds to the miscellaneous cares of her "bereaved" life,
flirtation from the hearse which carries her husband to his final
mansion. She flirts in her weeds more glowingly than ever. But she knows
too well the "value of her liberty" to submit to be a slave once more;
and so flirts on for life, in the most innocent manner imaginable,
taking all risks, and throwing herself into situations of which the
result would be obvious any where but in the pages of an _English_
novel.

The French have no scruples on such subjects, and their candour leaves
nothing to the imagination. Our female novelists have not yet arrived at
that pitch of explicitness, and it is to be hoped will pause before they
leap the gulf.

We attribute a good deal of this dangerous adoption to the prevalent
habit of yearly running to the Continent. The English ear becomes
familiarised to language on the other side of the Channel, which would
have shocked it here. The chief topic of foreign life is intrigue, the
chief employment of foreign life is that half idle, half infamous
intercourse, which extinguishes all delicacy even in the spectators. The
young English woman sees the foreign woman leading a life which, though
in England it would stamp her with universal shame, in France or
Germany, and above all, in Italy, never brings more than a sneer, and
seldom even the sneer. She sees this wedded or widowed profligate
received in the highest ranks; flourishing without a reproach, if she
has the means of keeping an opera-box, or giving suppers; every soul
round her acquainted with every point of her history, yet none shrinking
from her association. If she has one Cicisbeo, or ten, the whole affair
is _selon les regles_.

The young English woman who blushes at this scandalous career, or
exhibits any reluctance on the subject of the companionship or the
crime, is laughed at as a "novice," is charged with a want of the
"_savoir vivre_," is quietly reproved for "the coldness of her English
blood," and is recommended to abandon, as speedily as possible, ideas so
unsuitable to "the glow of the warm South."

She soon finds a dangler, or a dozen danglers, who, having nothing on
earth to do, and in their penury rejoiced to fi