Thus my poor sketch, faint as its colors are, may
acquire some little value in the reader's eyes from the consideration
that no observer of the coming time will ever have an opportunity to
give a better. I should find it difficult to believe, however, that the
queer pastime just described, or any moral mischief to which that and
other customs might pave the way, can have led to the overthrow of
Greenwich Fair; for it has often seemed to me that Englishmen of station
and respectability, unless of a peculiarly philanthropic turn, have
neither any faith in the feminine purity of the lower orders of their
countrywomen, nor the slightest value for it, allowing its possible
existence. The distinction of ranks is so marked, that the English
cottage-damsel holds a position somewhat analogous to that of the negro
girl in our Southern States. Hence comes inevitable detriment to the
moral condition of those men themselves, who forget that the humblest
woman has a right and a duty to hold herself in the same sanctity as
the highest. The subject cannot well be discussed in these pages; but I
offer it as a serious conviction, from what I have been able to observe,
that the England of to-day is the unscrupulous old England of Tom Jones
and Joseph Andrews, Humphrey Clinker and Roderick Random; and in our
refined era, just the same as at that more free-spoken epoch, this
singular people has a certain contempt for any fine-strained purity, any
special squeamishness, as they consider it, on the part of an ingenuous
youth.
Pages:
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134