The other curse of the happy, has a range more wide and indiscriminate.  It, too, tortures only the comparatively rich and fortunate; but is most active among the least distinguished; and abates in malignity as we ascend to the lofty regions of pure ennui.  This is the desire of being fashionable;—­the restless and insatiable passion to pass for creatures a little more distinguished than we really are—­with the mortification of frequent failure, and the humiliating consciousness of being perpetually exposed to it.  Among those who are secure of “meat, clothes, and fire,” and are thus above the chief physical evils of existence, we do believe that this is a more prolific source of unhappiness, than guilt, disease, or wounded affection; and that more positive misery is created, and more true enjoyment excluded, by the eternal fretting and straining of this pitiful ambition, than by all the ravages of passion, the desolations of war, or the accidents or mortality.  This may appear a strong statement; but we make it deliberately; and are deeply convinced of its truth.  The wretchedness which it produces may not be so intense; but it is of much longer duration, and spreads over a far wider circle.  It is quite dreadful, indeed, to think what a sweep of this pest has taken among the comforts or our prosperous population.  To be though fashionable—­that is, to be thought more opulent and tasteful, and on a footing of intimacy with a greater number of distinguished persons than they really are, is the great and laborious pursuit of four families out of five, the members of which are exempted from the necessity of daily industry.  In this pursuit, their time, spirits, and talents are wasted; their tempers soured; their affections palsied; and their natural manners and dispositions altogether sophisticated and lost.

These are the great twin scourges of the prosperous:  But there are other maladies, of no slight malignity, to which they are peculiarly liable.  One of these, arising mainly from want of more worthy occupation, is that perpetual use of stratagem and contrivance—­that little, artful diplomacy of private life, by which the simplest and most natural transactions are rendered complicated and difficult, and the common business of existence made to depend on the success of plots and counterplots.  By the incessant practice of this petty policy, a habit of duplicity and anxiety is infallibly generated, which is equally fatal to integrity and enjoyment.  We gradually come to look on others with the distrust which we are conscious of deserving; and are insensibly formed to sentiments of the most unamiable selfishness and suspicion.  It is needless to say, that all these elaborate artifices are worse than useless to the person who employs them; and that the ingenious plotter is almost always baffled and exposed by the downright honesty of some undesigning competitor.  Miss Edgeworth, in her tale of “Manoeuvring,” has given a very complete and most entertaining representation