Here I am in another digression, and sorry am I not to follow it out further; but for the present I must not--so now, to try back: I will suppose my absentee friend to have passed his "day in town," amazed and surprised at the various changes about him; I will not bewilder him with any glance at our politics, nor puzzle him with that game of cross corners by which every one seems to have changed his place; nor attempt any explanation of the mysterious doctrine by which the party which affects the strongest attachment to the sovereign should exult in any defeat to her armies; nor how the supporters of the government contribute to its stability, by rabid attacks on its members, and absurd comparisons of their own fitness for affairs, with the heads of our best and wisest. These things he must have remembered long ago, and with respect to them, we are pretty much as we were; but I will introduce him to an evening party--a society where the _élite_ of Dublin are assembled; where, amid the glare of wax lights, and the more brilliant blaze of beauty, our fairest women and most gifted and exalted men are met together for enjoyment. At first blush there will appear to him to have been no alteration nor change here. Even the very faces he will remember are the same he saw a dozen years ago: some pursy gentlemen with bald foreheads or grey whiskers who danced before, are now grown whisters; a few of the ladies, who then figured in the quadrille, have assumed the turban, and occupy an ottoman; the gay, laughing, light-hearted youth he formerly hobnobbed with at supper, is become a rising barrister, and has got up a look of learned pre-occupation, much more imposing to his sister than to Sir Edward Sugden; the wild, reckless collegeman, whose name was a talisman in the "Shades," is now a soft-voiced young physician, vibrating in his imitation of the two great leaders in his art, and alternately assuming the "Epic or the Lake" school of physic. All this may amuse, but cannot amaze him: such is the natural current of events, and he ought to be prepared for it. The evening wears on, however; the frigid politeness and ceremonious distance which we have for some years back been borrowing from our neighbours, and which seem to suit our warmer natures pretty much as a suit of plate armour would a _danseuse_ in a ballet--this begins to wear off, and melt away before the genial heat of Irish temperament; "the mirth and fun grow fast and furious;" and a new dance is called for. What, then, is the amazement, shall I say the horror, of our friend to hear the band strike up a tune which he only remembered as associated with everything base, low, and disgraceful; which, in the days of his "libertine youth," he only heard at riotous carousals and roistering festivals; whose every bar is associated with words--ay, there's the rub--which, in his maturer years, he blushes to have listened to! he stares about him in wonderment; for a moment he forgets that the young lady who dances with such evident enjoyment of the air, is ignorant of its history; he watches her sparkling eye and animated gesture, without remembering that _she_ knows nothing off the associations at which her partner is, perhaps, smirking; he sees her _vis-à-vis_ exchanging looks with his friend, that denote _their_ estimation of the music; and in very truth, so puzzled is he, he begins to distrust his senses. The air ceases, and is succeeded by another no less known, no less steeped in the same class of associations, and so to the conclusion. These remembrances of past wickedness go on "crescendo," till the _finale_ caps the whole with a melody, to which even the restraints of society are scarcely able to prevent a humming accompaniment of concurring voices, and--these are the Irish Quadrilles! What can account for this? What special pleading will find an argument in its favour? When Wesley objected to all the good music being given to the devil, he only excused his adoption of certain airs which, in their popular form, had never been connected with religious words and feelings; and in his selection of them, was rigidly mindful to take such only as in their character became easily convertible to his purpose: he never enlisted those to which, by an unhappy destiny, vulgarising and indelicate associations have been so connected as to become inseparably identified; and although the object is widely different, I cannot see how, for the purposes of social enjoyment, we should have diverged from his example.