Page:Lady Anne Granard 2.pdf/172

170 girls, whom fancy fairs expressly ruin—say, that a few hundred pounds are amassed to recruit a hospital or open a dispensary—in that very act you take away shillings, crowns, and pounds, from the industrious and helpless, who are starving for the want of them; you relieve one pauper and you make two: this is so well known that you, Mr. Wallaston, cannot say one word on that part of the subject." "But even allowing you to be right, Sir Robert, so far as the charity goes, you must grant that a fancy fair is a good thing, so far as it shows that the great of the land are interested in its institutions—willing to unite with the circle below them for a good end—and prove, by the suavity of their manners, that the aristocracy of this country are by no means the proud, fastidious exclusives we have been taught to believe them!" "Fiddle de dee, the whole thing is neither more nor less than a substitute for the masquerade, which luckily became so gross, it died of repletion. Instead of nuns and sultanas crowding playhouses, we have now pretty shopkeepers, simpering under bowers, behind boards of greencloth, selling pincushions and purses to ogling lords and city dandies, fops and roués, as well in low life as high (so they can pay entrance-money), whose grandmothers would have shuddered at such contamination, and whose husbands may reflect, in days to come, on the sweet words used to decoy a purchaser, or the smile that lingered on a