hotels and a series of organised homes. Saratoga perhaps deserves our greater homage, as being characteristically democratic and American; let us, then, make Saratoga the heaven of our aspiration, but let us yet a while content ourselves with Newport as the lowly earth of our residence.
The villas and "cottages," the beautiful idle women, the beautiful idle men, the brilliant pleasure-fraught days and evenings, impart, perhaps, to Newport life a faintly European expression, in so far as they suggest the somewhat alien presence of leisure—"fine old Leisure," as George Eliot calls it. Nothing, it seems to me, however, can take place in America without straightway seeming very American; and, after a week at Newport, you begin to fancy that to live for amusement simply, beyond the noise of commerce or of care, is a distinctively national trait. Nowhere else in this country—nowhere, of course, within the range of our better civilisation—does business seem so remote, so vague, and unreal. It is the only place in America in which enjoyment is organised. If there be any poetry in the ignorance of trade and turmoil and the hard processes of fortune, Newport may claim her share of it. She knows—or at least appears to know—for the most part nothing but results. Individuals here, of course, have private cares and burdens to preserve the balance and the dignity of life; but collective society conspires to forget everything that worries. It is a singular fact that a society that does nothing is decidedly more pictorial, more interesting to the eye of contemplation, than a society which is hard at work. Newport, in this way, is infinitely more
