g due respect to the bottle.

However, when numerous circles are to be brought together, and when
neither literature nor public amusements furnish topics for conversation,
a good dinner appears to be the only centre to rally round, especially as
scandal, the zest of more select parties, can only be whispered. As for
politics, I have seldom found it a subject of continual discussion in a
country town in any part of the world. The politics of the place, being
on a smaller scale, suits better with the size of their faculties; for,
generally speaking, the sphere of observation determines the extent of
the mind.

The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced that civilisation is
a blessing not sufficiently estimated by those who have not traced its
progress; for it not only refines our enjoyments, but produces a variety
which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations.
Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must
sink into grossness, unless continual novelty serve as a substitute for
the imagination, which, being impossible, it was to this weariness, I
suppose, that Solomon alluded when he declared that there was nothing new
under the sun!--nothing for the common sensations excited by the senses.
Yet who will deny that the imagination and understanding have made many,
very many discoveries since those days, which only seem harbingers of
others still more noble and beneficial? I never met with much
imagination amongst people who had not acquired a habit of reflection;
and in that state of society in which the judgment and taste are not
called forth, and formed by the cultivation of the arts and sciences,
little of that delicacy of feeling and thinking is to be found
characterised by the word sentiment. The want of scientific pursuits
perhaps accounts for the hospitality, as well as for the cordial
reception which strangers receive from the inhabitants of small towns.

Hospitality has, I think, been too much praised by travellers as a proof
of goodness of heart, when, in my opinion, indiscriminate hospitality is
rather a criterion by which you may form a tolerable estimate of the
indolence or vacancy of a head; or, in other words, a fondness for social
pleasures in which the mind not having its proportion of exercise, the
bottle must be pushed about.

These remarks are equally applicable to Dublin, the most hospitable city
I ever passed through. But I will try to con