And Now, Having Given You Some Idea WHOM We Are Seeing Here, You
Will Wish To Know How I Like Them, And How They Differ From Our Own
People.
At the smaller dinners and SOIREES at this season I cannot,
of course, receive a full impression of English society, but
certainly those persons now in town are charming people.
Their
manners are perfectly simple and I entirely forget, except when
their historic names fall upon my ear, that I am with the proud
aristocracy of England. All the persons whose names I have
mentioned to you give one a decided impression not only of ability
and agreeable manners, but of excellence and the domestic virtues.
The furniture and houses, too, are less splendid and ostentatious,
than those of our large cities, though [they] have more plate, and
liveried servants. The forms of society and the standard of dress,
too, are very like ours, except that a duchess or a countess has
more hereditary point lace and diamonds. The general style of
dress, perhaps, is not so tasteful, so simply elegant as ours. Upon
the whole I think more highly of our own country (I mean from a
social point of view alone) than before I came abroad. There is
less superiority over us in manners and all the social arts than I
could have believed possible in a country where a large and wealthy
class have been set apart from time immemorial to create, as it
were, a social standard of high refinement.
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