The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction

e ruin of a young man of family. There is so much vice and unprincipled waste opposed to indignant and rapacious clamour, often accompanied with idle jests. Here again is food for the vitiated appetites of scandalmongers, and that miserable but numerous portion of mankind, who rejoice at the fall of a superior. The name of debtor is an odium which a proud spirit can but ill support; cunning and avarice come in a thousand shapes, not to retrieve lost credit, but to swell the list of embarrassments;--friends have fled at the approach of the crisis, and associates appear but to pluck the poor victim of the wrecks of his fortune! Absenteeism, the curse of England, is the only alternative of wretched and humiliating imprisonment. An entire change of habit ensues: ease and elegance of manners dwindle into coldness and neglect, liberality to meanness, and good-natured simplicity to chicanery and cunning. In society, too, how changed; once the gay table companion, full of gallantry and wit, now solitary and