would be any thing but a luxury.  So, in the other extreme, a watch should not be so small as to render the dial-plate illegible; nor should a shoe be so tight as to lame its wearer for life.  Beauty, it has been said, should learn to suffer; and there are, I am aware, resources in vanity, that will reconcile man, and woman too, to martyrdom; but these resources should not be exhausted wantonly; and in pleasure, as in economy, there is no benefit in lighting the candle at both ends.  The true philosopher extracts the greatest good out of every thing; and fools only, as Horace has it, run into one vice in trying to avoid another.  Let not the reader, from these remarks, suppose that their author is a morose censurer of the times; or that the least sneer is intended against that idol of all orthodoxy “things as they are.”  As a general proposition, nothing can be more true, than that whatever is established, even in the world of fashion, is, for the time being, wisest, discreetest, best; and, woe betide the man that flies too directly in its face.

There is, however, one point upon which I own myself a little sore; and in which, I do think, superfluities are carried to a somewhat vicious excess.  The point to which I allude, and I beg the patience of the reader, is the vast increase of superfluities, which of late years have become primary necessaries in the appointment of a well-furnished house.  Here, indeed, is a revolution; a revolution more formidable than the French and the American emancipation put together.  We all remember the time when one tea-table, two or three card-tables, a pier glass, a small detachment of chairs, with two armed corporals to command them, on either side the fire-place, with a square piece of carpet in the centre of the floor, made a very decent display in the drawing, or (as it was then preposterously called) the dining-room.  As yet, rugs for the hearth were not; and twice a day did Betty go upon her knees to scour the marble and uncovered slab.  In the bedrooms of those days, a narrow slip of carpet round the bed was the maximum of woollen integument allowed for protecting the feet of the midnight wanderer from his couch; and, in the staircases of the fairest mansions, a like slip meandered down the centre of the flight of steps.  At that time, curtains rose and fell in a line parallel to the horizon, after the simple plan of the green siparium of our theatres; and, being strictly confined to the windows, they never dreamed of displaying themselves in front of a door.  No golden serpents then twisted their voluminous folds across the entire breadth of the room; nor did richly-carved cods’ heads and shoulders, under the denomination of dolphins, or glittering spread eagles, with a brass ring in their mouths, support fenestral draperies, which rival the display of a Waterloo-house calico-vender.  Thus far, I admit, the change is an improvement.  Nay, I could away with ladders to go to bed withal, though many a time