[57] Vide the titles of certain country-dances, the Pantomime of Don Juan, and the ballets at the Opera House, on the vigils of the Sabbath.
[66] The Bishop of Durham animadverts (with just severity) upon “the great neglect of church in the Sunday afternoons, when the duties of religion are deserted for the fashions or friendship if the world.” Vide Charge for 1801.
[104] If the reader should have a difficulty in discovering the full import of this remark, he is requested to consider that the peculiar term appropriated to swearing is capable of becoming either a verb, a substantive, a participial adjective, or an adverb: and he will find that it is used under all these forms by people of Fashion.
[116] How much the Fashionable World are indebted to the legislature for refusing to accede to Lord Belgrave (now Earl Grosvenor’s) motion against Sunday newspapers, in 1799, may be learnt (among other things) from the following advertisement which appeared in the Morning Post for October 26, 1805:
“The British Neptune, or Naval, Military, and Fashionable Sunday Advertiser, will always contain real critiques upon Theatrical Performances.”
Such entertaining publications as these, issued and hawked about on the Lord’s Day, are a concession to the Fashionable infirmities of the age, for which those who are wearied of their Bibles, cannot be sufficiently thankful.
If any of my readers wish to see this subject seriously discussed, he will find something to his purpose in the 6th chapter of “The Christian Monitor for the last Days.”
N.B. While this note was passing through the press, a Sunday Evening Paper was announced for publication: and, as if it were not sufficient to break the laws, without at the same time libelling them, this “Sunday Evening Gazette,” which is to employ compositors, pressmen, venders, hawkers, &c. on the Lord’s Day, is to be called—The Constitution!!!
[119] A distinguished Prelate, who gained the ear of the Fashionable World to a degree beyond all former example, has adverted to this “rage for amusement” with such apostolical earnestness, at the close of a lecture delivered to perhaps the greatest number of Fashionable people that ever assembled for a similar purpose within the walls of a church, that I shall avail myself of the passage, as well to confirm my statement as to embellish my pages.
“When I consider that the time of the year is now approaching, in which the gaieties and amusements of this vast metropolis are generally engaged in with incredible alacrity and ardour, and multitudes are pouring in from every part of the kingdom to take their share in them; and when I recollect further, that at this very period in the last year, a degree of extravagance and wildness of pleasure took place, which gave pain to every serious mind, and was almost unexampled in any former times, I am not, I confess, without some apprehensions that the same scenes of levity and dissipation may again recur; and that some of those who now hear me (of the younger part more especially) may be drawn too far into this Fashionable vortex, and lose, in that giddy tumult of diversion, all remembrance of what has passed in this sacred place.” Bp Porteus on St. Matthew, Vol. II. Lect. 18, p. 161.