squeaking; if petticoats are worn short, theirs are up to their knees;
they are never out of sight, never in repose; summer and winter, day and
night, they seem in a state of fearful excitement, flirting, philandering,
raffling, racing, practising, and patronizing; they are great people in a
small way, and only considered great because nothing greater is at hand;
they prefer reigning in hell (excuse the word, I quote Milton) to serving
in heaven; in London they would be nothing, at Hogs Norton Spa, or
Pumpington Wells, they are every thing; making difficulties about
admissions to Lilliputian Almack's."


_To have Style_.

"To _have_ style is to be always dressed to perfection, without appearing
to care about the fashion; and to take the station and precedence which
you are entitled to, without seeming to be solicitous about it. I have
seen dowagers at watering-places in a fever of anxiety about their rank
and their consequence! patronizing puppetshows, seizing conspicuous seats,
and withholding the sunshine of their smiles from commoners allied to
older nobility than their own! How I should enjoy seeing them lost in a
London crowd, where not an eye would notice their aristocracy unless they
wore their coronets on the tops of their bonnets!"


_The Popular Complaint_.

"I am afraid of catching the popular complaint: all the professedly sane
people in London are so evidently mad, that I am led to conclude that all
the supposed lunatics are in their sound senses.