The Project Gutenberg EBook of Honor O'callaghan, by Mary Russell Mitford

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Title: Honor O'callaghan

Author: Mary Russell Mitford

Release Date: October 2, 2007 [EBook #22840]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

HONOR O'CALLAGHAN

By Mary Russell Mitford

Times are altered since Gray spoke of the young Etonians as a set of
dirty boys playing at cricket. There are no such things as boys to be
met with now, either at Eton or elsewhere; they are all men from ten
years old upwards. Dirt also hath vanished bodily, to be replaced by
finery. An aristocratic spirit, an aristocracy not of rank but of
money, possesses the place, and an enlightened young gentleman of my
acquaintance, who when somewhere about the ripe age of eleven, conjured
his mother "_not_ to come to see him until she had got her new carriage,
lest he should be quizzed by the rest of the men," was perhaps no unfair
representative of the mass of his schoolfellows. There are of course
exceptions to the rule. The sons of the old nobility, too much
accustomed to splendour in its grander forms, and too sure of their own
station to care about such matters, and the few finer spirits, whose
ambition even in boyhood soars to far higher and holier aims, are,
generally speaking, alike exempt from these vulgar cravings after petty
distinctions. And for the rest of the small people, why "winter and
rough weather," and that most excellent schoolmaster, the world, will
not fail, sooner or later, to bring them to wiser thoughts.

In the meanwhile, as according to our homely proverb, "for every gander
there's a goose," so there are not wanting in London and its environs
"establishments," (the good old name of boarding-school being altogether
done away with,) where young ladies are trained up in a love of fashion
and finery, and a reverence for the outward symbols of wealth, which
cannot fail to render them worthy compeers of the young gentlemen
their contemporaries. I have known a little girl, (fit mate for the
above-mentioned amateur of new carriages,) who complained that _her_
mamma called upon