There would be no end of going over all the eccentricities of Fashionable morality. To those who exact that truth which allows of no duplicity, that honour which scorns all baseness, and that virtue which wars with every vice, I question but every thing in the morals of this people would appear anomalous and extraordinary: but to those who consider, how necessary a certain portion of wickedness is to such a life of sense as these people must necessarily lead, it will not be matter of surprise that there should be so little genuine morality among them; the wonder will rather be—that there should be any at all.
NO people in the universe expend larger sums upon the education of their children than people of Fashion. It is a maxim with them to commence the great business of instruction in the very earliest period of life; and if the system of education corresponded with the pains bestowed upon it, and the price at which it is purchased, no persons would do more honour to society than the subjects of the Fashionable World. As it is, they are not a little ornamental to a nation. They are not, it is true, either the columns or the base of the building; they neither support nor strengthen it: but they supply the place of reliefs, and hangings, and other superadded decorations.
Religion is allowed a respectable place among the studies of the nursery. All those useful tables of instruction are assiduously employed, which teach, who was the _first_, the _wisest_, the _meekest_, and the _strongest_ man; and the nursling is carefully conducted, by a catechetical process, into the theory and practice of a Christian. As, however, the child advances to boyish or girlish years, this religious discipline is pretty generally relaxed, in order to allow sufficient scope for the cultivation of those modish pursuits, which mark the man and the woman of Fashion.
And here I cannot help remarking, how anxious the greater part of Fashionable parents are, to guard the minds of their children against the _permanent_ influence of that religion, which they yet have caused them to be taught. The fact is, that they would have them acquainted with the technical language, and expert in the liturgical formalities of Christianity; for these acquirements can neither disparage their character, nor impede their pleasures: but a serious impression of its truths upon their hearts, might disaffect them to the follies and vices which they are destined to practise; and therefore is the thing, of all others, that is most to be dreaded. The parents are, to say the truth, not a little hampered by the engagements under which they have bound the child, on the one part; and the character which they wish him to sustain, on the other. To leave him in ignorance of a covenant in which he has been involuntarily included, would be a fraud upon his conscience; and yet, to have him renounce the devil, the world, and the flesh, would be the utter ruin of his Fashionable reputation. What other course, then, can parents thus circumstanced pursue, than that of inculcating these lessons before they can be understood, and removing their impression before they can be practised?