e remark holds true
of their female companions, who are mostly the same ladies that you meet
in Regent-street in the afternoon, or hanging about the Hay-market all
night, a class at no time remarkable for modesty, but whom we shall see
in the course of the evening becoming bold and brazenfaced with
excitement and wine. But the theatre is full--the guests are met--the
band is assembled--the leader wields the baton--the sparkling chandeliers
give a lustre to the scene, and away they bound to the music, whilst from
the boxes and the gallery admiring crowds look down. Yes, there is a
wild excitement in the hour, which stirs even the pulses of old blood.
The women, as debardeurs, flower girls, sailor boys--many of them with
faces fitting them for diviner lives, look beautiful even in their
degradation and shame. Horace tells us, wherever we go black care gets
up and rides behind. Is it so? Can there be sad hearts beneath those
gay exteriors? Do those cheeks flushed and radiant eyes indicate that
they belong to those whom all moralists have held infamous, all religions
condemned, and whose existence our modern civilization perpetuates and
deplores? Is man an immortal being, sent here for awhile to triumph over
fleshly lusts and passions, to learn to trample as dross on the vanities
of earth, and to set his affections on things above? Is it true that the
most successful votaries of pleasure, from kingly Solomon to lordly
Byron, have borne the same testimony to them, that they are not worth the
gathering, that they are but as apples gathered by the shore of the Dead
Sea, fair to the eye but deadly to the taste, and that in no way can they
answer the need and aspirations of the heart of man, which is greater and
grander than them all? Have we paid ministers of religion, bishops and
archbishops, millions and millions of pounds to teach men these few
self-evident truths, and yet do such orgies as those of which we write
not merely exist but flourish, as if we had accepted the creed of the
Atheist,--"Let us eat and drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die"?
To-morrow! who around us now thinks of to-morrow? Not the young rake
chaffing and dancing before us, whose mirth is the delirium of
forgetfulness and the intoxication of wine, whose to-morrow is
Whitecross-street Prison or the Insolvent Debtors' Court. Not that
brazenfaced woman now arrayed in splendour, and surrounded by her
admirers, whose to-morrow is old age, neglec