The Ayrshire Legatees

LETTER XXIII

Andrew Pringle, Esq., to the Reverend Charles Snodgrass MY DEAR FRIEND--London undoubtedly affords the best and the worst

specimens of the British character; but there is a certain townish

something about the inhabitants in general, of which I find it extremely

difficult to convey any idea. Compared with the English of the country,

there is apparently very little difference between them; but still there

is a difference, and of no small importance in a moral point of view.

The country peculiarity is like the bloom of the plumb, or the down of

the peach, which the fingers of infancy cannot touch without injuring;

but this felt but not describable quality of the town character, is as

the varnish which brings out more vividly the colours of a picture, and

which may be freely and even rudely handled. The women, for example,

although as chaste in principle as those of any other community, possess

none of that innocent untempted simplicity, which is more than half the

grace of virtue; many of them, and even young ones too, "in the first

freshness of their virgin beauty," speak of the conduct and vocation of

"the erring sisters of the sex," in a manner that often amazes me, and

has, in more than one instance, excited unpleasant feelings towards the

fair satirists. This moral taint, for I can consider it as nothing less,

I have heard defended, but only by men who are supposed to have had a

large experience of the world, and who, perhaps, on that account, are not

the best judges of female delicacy. "Every woman," as Pope says, "may be

at heart a rake"; but it is for the interests of the domestic affections,

which are the very elements of virtue, to cherish the notion, that women,

as they are physically more delicate than men, are also so morally.

But the absence of delicacy, the bloom of virtue, is not peculiar to the

females, it is characteristic of all the varieties of the metropolitan

mind. The artifices of the medical quacks are things of universal

ridicule; but the sin, though in a less gross form, pervades the whole of

that sinister system by which much of the superiority of this vast

metropolis is supported. The state of the periodical press, that great

organ of political instruction--the unruly tongue of liberty, strikingly

confirms the justice of this misanthropic remark.

G--- had the kindness, by way of a treat to me, to collect, the other

day, at dinner, some of the most eminent editors of the London journals.

I found them men of talent, certainly, and much more men of the world,

than "the cloistered student from his paling lamp"; but I was astonished

to find it considered, tacitly, as a sort of maxim among them, that an

intermediate party was not bound by any obligation of honour to withhold,

farther than his own discretion suggested, any information of which he

was the accidental depositary, whatever the consequences might be to his

informant, or to those affected by the communication. In a word, they

seemed all to care less about what might be true than what would produce

effect, and that effect for their own particular advantage. It is

impossible to deny, that if interest is made the criterion by which the

confidences of social intercourse are to be respected, the persons who

admit this doctrine will have but little respect for the use of names, or

deem it any reprehensible delinquency to suppress truth, or to blazon

falsehood. In a word, man in London is not quite so good a creature as

he is out of it. The rivalry of interests is here too intense; it

impairs the affections, and occasions speculations both in morals and

politics, which, I much suspect, it would puzzle a casuist to prove

blameless. Can anything, for example, be more offensive to the calm

spectator, than the elections which are now going on? Is it possible

that this country, so much smaller in geographical extent than France,

and so inferior in natural resources, restricted too by those ties and

obligations which were thrown off as fetters by that country during the

late war, could have attained, in despite of her, such a lofty

pre-eminence--become the foremost of all the world--had it not been

governed in a manner congenial to the spirit of the people, and with

great practical wisdom? It is absurd to assert, that there are no

corruptions in the various modifications by which the affairs of the

British empire are administered; but it would be difficult to show, that,

in the present state of morals and interests among mankind, corruption is

not a necessary evil. I do not mean necessary, as evolved from those

morals and interests, but necessary to the management of political

trusts. I am afraid, however, to insist on this, as the natural

integrity of your own heart, and the dignity of your vocation, will alike

induce you to condemn it as Machiavellian. It is, however, an

observation forced on me by what I have seen here.