Along the walks
of high life Death goes a mowing--and such harvests as are reaped!
_Materia medica_ has been exhausted to find curatives for these
physiological devastations. Dropsies, cancers, consumptions, gout, and
almost every infirmity in all the realm of pathology, have been the
penalty paid. To counteract the damage, pharmacy has gone forth with
medicament, panacea, elixir, embrocation, salve, and cataplasm.
To-night, with swollen feet, upon cushioned ottoman, and groaning
with aches innumerable, is the votary of luxurious living, not half so
happy as his groom or coal-heaver.
Fashion is the world's undertaker, and drives thousands of hearses to
Laurel Hill and Greenwood.
But, worse than that, this folly is an intellectual depletion. This
endless study of proprieties and etiquette, patterns and styles, is
bedwarfing to the intellect. I never knew a man or a woman of extreme
fashion that knew much. How belittling the study of the cut of a coat,
or the tie of a cravat, or the wrinkle in a shoe, or the color of a
ribbon! How they are worried if something gets untied, or hangs awry,
or is not nicely adjusted! With a mind capable of measuring the
height and depth of great subjects; able to unravel mysteries; to
walk through the universe; to soar up into the infinity of God's
attributes,--hovering perpetually over a new style of mantilla! I have
known men, reckless as to their character, and regardless of interests
momentous and eternal, exasperated by the shape of a vest-button!
What is the matter with that woman--wrought up into the agony of
despair? O, her muff is out of fashion!
Worse than all--this folly is not satisfied until it has extirpated
every moral sentiment, and blasted the soul.
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