Alas, that our Mirabels, our Valentines, even our Brummels, should have left their mantles upon nothing more amusing! Nor are the fast men less constrained.

Solemnity, even in dissipation, is the order of the day; and they go to the devil with a perverse seriousness, a systematic rationalism of wickedness that would have surprised the simpler sinners of old.

Some of these men whom we see gravely conversing on the steps have but a slender acquaintance with each other.

Their intercourse consists principally of mutual bulletins of depravity; and, week after week, as they meet they reckon up their items of transgression, and give an abstract of their downward progress for approval and encouragement.

These folk form a freemasonry of their own.
An oath is the shibboleth of their sinister fellowship.