“Truth,” continued he, “the most amiable, as well as the most natural of virtues, you are at pains to eradicate.  Your very nurseries are seminaries of falsehood; and what is called Fashion in manhood completes the system of avowed insincerity.  Mankind, in the gross, is a gaping monster, that loves to be deceived, and has seldom been disappointed:  nor is their vanity less fallacious to your philosophers, who adopt modes of truth to follow them through the paths of error, and defend paradoxes merely to be singular in defending them.  These are they whom ye term Ingenious; ’tis a phrase of commendation I detest:  it implies an attempt to impose on my judgment, by flattering my imagination; yet these are they whose works are read by the old with delight, which the young are taught to look upon as the codes of knowledge and philosophy.

“Indeed, the education of your youth is every way preposterous; you waste at school years in improving talents, without having ever spent an hour in discovering them; one promiscuous line of instruction is followed, without regard to genius, capacity, or probable situation in the commonwealth.  From this bear-garden of the pedagogue, a raw, unprincipled boy is turned loose upon the world to travel; without any ideas but those of improving his dress at Paris, or starting into taste by gazing on some paintings at Rome.  Ask him of the manners of the people, and he will tell you that the skirt is worn much shorter in France, and that everybody eats macaroni in Italy.  When he returns home, he buys a seat in parliament, and studies the constitution at Arthur’s.

“Nor are your females trained to any more useful purpose:  they are taught, by the very rewards which their nurses propose for good behaviour, by the first thing like a jest which they hear from every male visitor of the family, that a young woman is a creature to be married; and when they are grown somewhat older, are instructed that it is the purpose of marriage to have the enjoyment of pin-money, and the expectation of a jointure.”

“These, {61} indeed, are the effects of luxury, which is, perhaps, inseparable from a certain degree of power and grandeur in a nation.  But it is not simply of the progress of luxury that we have to complain:  did its votaries keep in their own sphere of thoughtless dissipation, we might despise them without emotion; but the frivolous pursuits of pleasure are mingled with the most important concerns of the state; and public enterprise shall sleep till he who should guide its operation has decided his bets at Newmarket, or fulfilled his engagement with a favourite mistress in the country.  We want some man of acknowledged eminence to point our counsels with that firmness which the counsels of a great people require.  We have hundreds of ministers, who press forward into office without having ever learned that art which is necessary for every business:  the art of thinking; and mistake the petulance, which