Page:Cleland - Woman of Honour Volume I (1768).djvu/156

150 tastelessness, to call high-life; the noble sphere of which consists in felling themselves and their country, like negroes, to some minister as worthless as themselves; in cheating, or being cheated, at the gaming-table, or on the turf; in being lived on by their flatterers, poisoned by their cooks, and cullied by drabs whom their footmen might disdain. Not that, at bottom, Lord Lovell had not, with some wit, more hopeful dispositions, but he was weak enough to be subdued by the instinct of imitation, so as to be drawn into the whirl of the current follies, and became good for nothing by the force of example. Nothing, however, more common than that flimsy pliancy, that imbecillity of character, which renders