There is sometimes seen more natural ease and grace in a common gipsy-girl than in an English court-circle. To demand a reason why, is to ask why the strolling fortune-teller’s hair and eyes are black, or her face oval.
LVI
The greatest proof of pride is its being able to extinguish envy and jealousy. Vanity produces the latter effect on the continent.
LVII
When you speak of the popular effect and enthusiasm produced by the ceremonies of the Catholic church, it is presently objected that all this faith and zeal is excited by mummery and superstition. I am ready to allow that; and when I find that truth and reason have the same homage and reverence paid to them as absurdity and falsehood, I shall think all the advantages are clearly on the side of the former. The processes of reason do not commonly afford the elements of passion as their result; and the object of strong and even lofty feeling seems to appeal rather to the grossness and incongruity of the senses and imagination, than to the clear and dry deductions of the understanding. Man has been truly defined a religious animal; but his faith and heavenward aspirations cease if you reduce him to a mere mathematical machine. The glory and the power of the true religion are in its enlisting the affections of man along with the understanding.
LVIII
We are imposed upon by the affectation of grace and gentility only till we see the reality; and then we laugh at the counterfeit, and are surprised that we did not see through it before.
LIX
English women, even of the highest rank, look like dowdies in Paris; or exactly as countrywomen do in London. It is a rule-of-three proportion. A French milliner or servant maid laughs (not without reason) at an English Duchess. The more our fair country women dress à la Française, the more unlucky they seem; and the more foreign graces they give themselves, the more awkward they grow. They want the tournure Françoise. Oh! how we have ‘melted, thawed, and dissolved into a dew,’ to see a bustling, red-faced, bare-necked English Duchess, or banker’s wife, come into a box at the French theatre, bedizened and bedaubed! My Lady-mayoress or the Right Honourable the Countess Dowager of ——, before she ventures on the word vulgar, or scorns her untitled and untutored neighbours as beneath her notice, should go to see les Angloises pour rire! That is the looking-glass for upstart wealth and inflated aristocracy.