The same want of care operates, in another way, by lowering the
standard of health, increasing the susceptibility to nervous or
sentimental impressions, and thus adding to the other powers of nature
over us whatever charm may be felt in her fostering the melancholy
fancies of brooding idleness.
It is not, however, only to existing inanimate nature that our want of
beauty in person and dress has driven us. The imagination of it, as it
was seen in our ancestors, haunts us continually; and while we yield
to the present fashions, or act in accordance with the dullest modern
principles of economy and utility, we look fondly back to the manners
of the ages of chivalry, and delight in painting, to the fancy, the
fashions we pretend to despise, and the splendours we think it wise to
abandon. The furniture and personages of our romance are sought, when
the writer desires to please most easily, in the centuries which we
profess to have surpassed in everything; the art which takes us into
the present times is considered as both daring and degraded; and while
the weakest words please us, and are regarded as poetry, which recall
the manners of our forefathers, or of strangers, it is only as
familiar and vulgar that we accept the description of our own.
In this we are wholly different from all the races that preceded us.
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