Think of the change! A Minister now toils during seventeen hours per
day, and receives less than a successful barrister. He must give up
all the ordinary pleasures of life; and, in recompense for the
sacrifice, he can claim but little patronage. By most of the men in
office the work is undertaken on purely patriotic grounds; so that a
duke with a quarter of a million per year is content to labour like an
attorney's clerk.
If we think about the ladies of the old days, we are more than ever
driven to reflection. It is impossible to imagine a more insensate
collection of gamblers than the women of Horace Walpole's society.
Well-bred harpies won and lost fortunes, and the vice became a raging
pest. A young politician could not further his own prospects better
than by letting some high-born dame win his money; if the youth won
the lady's money, then a discreet forgetfulness of the debt was
profitable to him. The rattle of dice and the shuffle of cards sounded
wherever two or three fashionable persons were gathered together; men
and women quarrelled, and society became a mere jumble of people who
suspected and hated and thought to rob each other.
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