Mrs. Grundy is omnipresent. Go where you will, you cannot escape from her presence. She stands guard unceasingly over your front door and back windows. Her watchful eye follows you whene’er you take your walks abroad. Your name is never mentioned that she is not by, and seriously inclined to hear aught that may increase her baleful stock of knowledge. It is all the same to her whether you have lived uprightly or viciously; beneath her Gorgon glance all human actions are petrified alike. And if she does not succeed in sowing discord around your hearthstone, and in driving you to despair and self-murder, as she did poor Henry Herbert the other day, it will be because you are not cursed with his fiery sensitiveness, and not because she lacks the will to do it.
There is but one way in which the Grundian yoke can be thrown off. We must treat her as the English wit treated an insignificant person who had insulted him; we must "let her alone severely." We pay a certain kind of allegiance to her if we take notice of her for the purpose of running counter to her notions. We must ignore her altogether. It is true, this requires a great deal of moral courage, particularly in a country where every body knows every body else’s business; but it is an easier task to acquire that courage than to submit patiently to Mrs. Grundy’s dictation and interference. Who shall estimate the happiness of that millennial period when we shall cease to ask ourselves before our every action, "What will Mrs. Grundy say?" and shall begin in earnest to live up to the golden rule that counsels us to mind our own business? When that day comes, what a world this will be! How will superficial morality and skin-deep propriety, envy and uncharitableness, be diminished! How will contentment, and mutual good will, and domestic peace be augmented! Think on these things, O beloved reader; mind your own business, and the day is not far distant when, for you at least, the iron sceptre of Dame Grundy shall be powerless, and the spell broken that held you in so humiliating a thraldom.
Life is what we make it. The same scenes wear a very different appearance to an ingenuous youth "in the bright morning of his virtues, in the full spring blossom of his hopes," and to the disappointed wretch who gazes on them "with the eyes of sour misanthropy." The horse that was turned by his benevolent owner into a carpenter’s shop, with a pair of green spectacles prefixed to his nose, and mistook the dry pine shavings for his legitimate fodder, was very much in the condition of a youth looking upon life and yielding to the natural enthusiasm of his unwarped spirit. Like the noble brute, however, the young man is undeceived as soon as he tries to sustain himself with the vanities which look so tempting and nutritious. He may, like a Wolsey, a Charles V., or a Napoleon, attain to the heights of power before the delusive glasses drop off; but even though the moment be delayed until he lies gasping in the clutch of that monarch to whom the most absolute of sovereigns and the most radical of republicans alike must yield allegiance, it is sure to come, and show him the ashes that lay hid beneath the fair, ripe-looking rind of the fruit he climbed so high to obtain. Life passes before us like a vast panorama, day by day and year by year unrolling and disclosing new scenes to charm us into self-forgetfulness. At one time, we breathe the bracing air of the mountains; at another, our eyes are gladdened by the sight of sunshiny meadows, or of fertile and far-reaching prairies; and then the towered city, with its grove of masts and its busy wharves, makes all mere natural beauty seem insignificant in comparison with the enterprise and ambition of man; until, at last, the canvas is rolled away, the music ceases, the lights are put out, and we are left to realize that all in which we delighted was but an illusion and a "fleeting show."