England is the only country which enjoys the unspeakable advantage of
being thus regularly, promptly, and accurately furnished with catalogues
of those favoured beings who are deemed qualified to enter the houses of
the great. What condescension in those who impart the information! What
indubitable evidence of true nobility! What superiority to all petty
vanity! And in those who receive it, what freedom from all little
feelings! No arrogance on one side; on the other, no envy. It is only
countries blessed with a free press that can be thus favoured. Even a
free press is not alone sufficient. Besides a free press, you must have
a servile public.
After all, let us be just. The uninitiated world is apt to believe that
there is sometimes, in the outskirts of fashion, an eagerness, scarcely
consistent with self-respect, to enter the mansions of the great. Not at
all: few people really want to go to their grand parties. It is not the
charms of conversation, the flash of wit or the blaze of beauty, the
influential presence of the powerful and celebrated, all the splendour
and refinement, which, combined, offer in a polished saloon so much
to charm the taste and satisfy the intellect, that the mass of social
partisans care anything about.
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