scandal repeated by Lord Charles Fitzhardinge, that for one example of bad conduct in France, I heard, at least, ten cited here.

"Yes, cited," replied Lord Nottingham; "but what does this prove, Miss Montressor? Why, not that there is more impropriety here than in France, but that we attach more.

importance to its existence, and more censure to those who practise it. If vice were as frequent in England as you imagine, it might be practised with greater impunity. The examples of it are not, as you observe, cited in France; but this fact, far from proving their non-existence, only implies that their frequency has habituated people to them; and that, therefore, they have ceased to excite the indignation, or to be visited by the obloquy, which attends similar offences in England. That country is the most demoralised where vice meets the fewest censurers. You must not

judge Englishwomen by the specimens Lord Charles Fitzhardinge has named; or by some of those you meet in the coterie of the Comtesse of Hohenlinden. These form the exceptions to the female propriety which, be assured, exists to a greater extent among the women of this country than in any other-a fact, of which the reprobation with which the conduct of the erring few is visited, furnishes the most undeniable proof."

"But I do not admit that impropriety of conduct meets with this reprobation," answered I; "au contraire, I assert, that nowhere is it practised with such impunity as here."

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Why will you judge England so superficially, Miss Montressor? and Englishwomen, by the clique (for it is nothing more), termed exclusives? which, like an unhealthy excrescence, has grown out of the repletion produced by

This

excess of luxury. The individuals composing the circle by which you judge, form, I repeat, the exception to the general rule. They act as if they considered themselves not amenable to the laws of society; and have established a little republic of their own, to oppose the government they could not subvert. clique stands apart, and long may it continue so, from the general mass of the higher class; and is at once our shame, and our reproach, in the estimation of those who, like you, consider its members, in consequence of their meretricious glare of fashion, as specimens of the morals and conduct of the great body of our aristocracy and gentry. As well might you suppose that, because our papers teem with reports of theft, all the English are addicted to that crime, as imagine that, because some individuals in a large community are guilty of

errors, all the rest are also culpable; whereas, in no country is theft viewed with more abhorrence, or punished with greater severity."

You see, chère Delphine, that I give you le pour et le contre in this description, in which I had not the superiority; unlike notre bonne Duchesse de Mirrecourt, who repeats only the strong part of her own conversations, and the weak ones of her adversaries. Is not this being frank?

Hitherto I have imagined, that goodness and dulness were synonymous terms; a mistake but too often made by those who, like me, look more to the pleasures of society than the happiness of a home. But the truth is, chère Delphine, that I have lived too much in the world, and examined too little my own heart, to have become acquainted with the quality of the soil; which, though perhaps naturally, not altogether evil, is covered by an artificial and

rocky stratum, that requires a careful and laborious cultivation to render it capable of producing aught but tares.

In la belle France one sees little of home; there is even in your language no epithet to express it for the chez moi is associated in my mind with certain evening receptions to some fifty of one's acquaintances, rather than with the domestic circle; and reminds me of your answer to madame votre mère, when she accused you of never being chez vous:— "Mais, ma chère mère, je suis, au contraire, très casanière cette année, car je reste chez moi deux fois dans la semaine; au lieu que, l'année passée, je ne restai qu'une." Well do I remember those two weekly soirées, when your salon was filled with the élite of all the spirituel in Paris; and this we considered being très casanier, n'est-ce pas ? Yet those were pleasant times, for, unlike the plan adopted here,