| Citation |
MG-S.783.050
4 Nov 1783:41,42 (2/78)
The English Catechism. Necessary for all Families.
Q. What is fashion?
A. An agreeable tyrant.
Q. What is its progress?
A. It begins, with the vain, is improved by the silly, and
stops with the wise.
Q. What does it regulate?
A. The dresses of the ladies, the philosophical, religious,
and political tenets of the men: the hours of meals, and the
value of toys; it determines which is the best stage-dancer,
the best physician, the best milliner, the most heavenly
opera, the soundest lawyer, and the finest woman of
pleasure.
Q. What is the present taste?
A. It consists in preferring French kick shaws to English
beef and pudding; dying away at an Italian opera, or having
a capacity sufficiently exalted to catch in a short time the
favorite airs of Artaxerxes, or the Maid of the Mill.
. . . [50 lines]
Q. What are the chief curiosities in England?
A. A modest woman of quality, a primitive bishop, a real
maid of five and twenty, an excise-man with a conscience a
h--n of common sense, a woman who has continued three months
a widow, a theatrical hero of modesty and oeconomy, an
attorney without a cloven-foot, & a man of parts, wit, and
learning, with 100 L. a year.
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