I have said, that fashion is a hard mistress: when we contemplate some scenes exhibited, not to the eye of the stranger, but within the circle of private families in this prosperous and enlightened country, we are often led to doubt, whether its boasted happiness is really so universal as patriot poets and patriot orators would teach us to believe. There is a state of things existing behind the scenes in many English homes, an under-current beneath the fair surface of domestic peace, to which belong some of the most pressing anxieties, the darkest forebodings, and the bitterest reflections of which the human mind is capable, and all arising out of the great national evil of competing with our neighbours in the luxuries and elegances of life, so as to be living constantly up to the extent of our pecuniary means, and too frequently beyond them.
It is not likely that young women should understand this evil in its full extent, or be aware of the many sad consequences resulting from it, but they do understand that it is not necessity, nor comfort, nor yet respectability, which makes them press upon their parents the often-repeated demand for money, where there is none to spare. No; it is fashion, the tyrant-mistress upon whose service they have entered, who calls upon them to be dressed in the appointed livery of all her slaves; and thus they wring a father's heart with sorrow, perhaps deprive him of the necessary comforts of old age; or they send away unpaid a poor and honest tradesman, because they cannot, "absolutely cannot," appear in company with an unfashionable dress.
Now, does it never occur to the amiable, and the affectionate, that a particular colour or form of dress is hardly worth a parent's heart-ache? I know it does; and they feel sorry sometimes to be thus the cause of what they would persuade themselves was unnecessary pain. But fashion is a cruel, as well as a hard mistress; and she tells
