in the faces of its devotees at the close of the London season, the mortality of milliners and the like, which its sudden exigencies yearly involve;—­and when to all these we add its fatal sin, that it blights, withers up, and kills, that high enjoyment it professedly ministers to—­that enjoyment which is a chief end of our hard struggling in life to obtain—­shall we not conclude that to reform our system of etiquette and fashion, is an aim yielding to few in urgency?

* * * * *

There needs, then, a protestantism in social usages.  Forms that have ceased to facilitate and have become obstructive—­whether political, religious, or other—­have ever to be swept away; and eventually are so swept away in all cases.  Signs are not wanting that some change is at hand.  A host of satirists, led on by Thackeray, have been for years engaged in bringing our sham-festivities, and our fashionable follies, into contempt; and in their candid moods, most men laugh at the frivolities with which they and the world in general are deluded.  Ridicule has always been a revolutionary agent.  That which is habitually assailed with sneers and sarcasms cannot long survive.  Institutions that have lost their roots in men’s respect and faith are doomed; and the day of their dissolution is not far off.  The time is approaching, then, when our system of social observances must pass through some crisis, out of which it will come purified and comparatively simple.

How this crisis will be brought about, no one can with any certainty say.  Whether by the continuance and increase of individual protests, or whether by the union of many persons for the practice and propagation of some better system, the future alone can decide.  The influence of dissentients acting without co-operation, seems, under the present state of things, inadequate.  Standing severally alone, and having no well-defined views; frowned on by conformists, and expostulated with even by those who secretly sympathise with them; subject to petty persecutions, and unable to trace any benefit produced by their example; they are apt, one by one, to give up their attempts as hopeless.  The young convention-breaker eventually finds that he pays too heavily for his nonconformity.  Hating, for example, everything that bears about it any remnant of servility, he determines, in the ardour of his independence, that he will uncover to no one.  But what he means simply as a general protest, he finds that ladies interpret into a personal disrespect.  Though he sees that, from the days of chivalry downwards, these marks of supreme consideration paid to the other sex have been but a hypocritical counterpart to the actual subjection in which men have held them—­a pretended submission to compensate for a real domination; and though he sees that when the true dignity of women is recognised, the mock dignities given to them will be abolished; yet he does not like to be thus misunderstood, and so hesitates in his practice.