text:  Instances indeed may be found where men eminent for science and literature or of high professional reputation inflamed with a distempered appetite for fashionable society "drag their slow lengths along" among the guardsmen and dowagers who frequent such scenes; but they are rather tolerated than encouraged and the sacrifices by which they purchase their admission into the dullest society of Europe are so numerous their appearance is so mortifying and the effect produced upon themselves so pernicious that hitherto such instances have served not as models to imitate but as bywords to deter