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MAKING ACQUAINTANCES.

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moreover being foreign reprints, or compiled from foreign authorities, the ordinary notions of politeness, even in America, are formed upon the standards which regulate Courts and aristocracies.

In countries where there are barriers in society which cannot be passed, there is reason in putting many difficulties and ceremonies in the way of making new acquaintances. A shop-keeper, or tradesman of any description, is looked upon in London, for instance, as an impossible visiting acquaintance for any one of the gentry. A merchant who is a millionaire, and who is just tolerated in Court society for his immense wealth, is an inaccessible acquaintance for smaller merchants. Artists are courted and invited, and their wives rejected and overlooked by the same circles. Literary men are, individually, on a footing with nobles and diplomatists, while their relatives are inferiors whom they would not dare to introduce to these their noble intimates. Those who live upon their incomes, and those who live by industry in business, are two classes impassably separated. It is understood and admitted, that it would be an inconvenience and an impropriety for the barriers between these divided ranks to be crossed. The etiquettes and ceremonies, therefore, which, in old countries, form the trench of nonacquaintance, are to prevent contact which the custom of ages has decreed to be unfit and irreconcileable.

That books of etiquette, based upon these mouldy distinctions, are unsuitable guides for the politeness of our young and fresh republic, the reader need not be told. Retaining all the common sense, and all the consideration for others, which European etiquette contains, there is still a large proportion of rubbish and absurdity, which we should at once set aside- -our slowness to do this, by the way, being the national fault which Lord Carlisle, in his late lecture on America, described as a tame and implicit submission to custom and opinion."

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To our correspondent's query we would say, (briefly) that any proposition of acquaintance, from one respectable American to another, is a compliment to the receiver. No such proposition is likely to be made, except by such as know the proper conditions of acquaintance to exist, nor is it likely to be declined, except by those who are so doubtful of their own position that they fear to receive acquaintances except

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through the medium of those above them. By any standard that can be tolerated in a republic, (we should suppose,) it is perfectly proper to leave a card, or to send a card with an invitation, to any one whom you may wish or think it would be reasonable, to propose acquaintance. One or the other of two people must make the advance; and we fancy that the probability of a first step of this kind being repelled-compliment as it is-is very much overrated. The one who declined it, if it ever occurred, would be the one, probably, whose station in society was the least secure-(reasonable equality of apparent respectability, and no covert objection between the parties, of course, presupposed).

The same reasoning applies, we think, to speaking without introductions. Any two persons who have a mutual friend might not be suitable acquaintances, in England-but they are, in America. Two guests at a party given by a third person, are sufficiently introduced, for this country, by the fact of meeting under the roof of a fellow-countryman who invited both as his equals. As they stand together in the crowd, or have opportunity for a polite service, one to the other, it is absurd, as well as injurious to the master of the house, to make the party stupid by waiting for formal introduction before any act of civility or agreeableness. America should improve on that point of English etiquette. Our correspondent's more particular inquiries are easily answered, according to the principles we have thus laid down. The first call upon those who had arrived from another city, was a courteous propriety. It is always such, to call, unintroduced, upon strangers in town, with motives of hospitality. The call was as courteously acknowledged, and, on going to the city where those lived who had thus responded to their politeness, the residents should have been apprised of the arrival of the strangers, by cards enclosed in an envelope, or left at the door. The response is thus delicately left at the option of the persons called on; but the case would be very rare in which it were not acknowledged by an immediate call, or a note explanatory of illness or other hindrance.

Fastidiousness, for a republic, (we may add,) is quite sufficiently guarded, by the easy falling off, from acquaintance, of those who find that they are not congenial. Where the only distinctions are made by difference in character and refinement, the barriers are better placed inside than outside an introduction.

CONVERSATION-DOM AND BOYS-AND-GIRLS-DOM. 211

SOCIETY, THIS WINTER.

THERE is a new feature in the gay life of New York-one of those endless varieties of lighter shading which compensate for the as endless sameness of the main outlines of societyand, while the novelty is, in itself, a refreshing improvement, we are not sure that the increasing knowingness, of which it is but one pencilling in many, will better, altogether, the tone of our American picture of gaiety. We refer to the definite separation, which has come about this winter, between Conversation-dom and Boys-and-girls-dom-the prevalence of soirées where "the children are not asked," and of balls where "none are invited but those who dance."

Society has hitherto been a game with but one stake in it -matrimony; and, that it should be unattractive, to those for whom success had removed this only interest in its chances, was, perhaps, primitively, quite as well. Young mothers went to bed instead of going to balls, and young fathers rested from the cares of business, instead of adding a gay man's waking night to a busy man's waking morninga "burning of candle at both ends" which could ill be afforded. The only sufferers, by this under-done state of society, have been the intellectually gay, who need evening parties for the interchange of wit and intelligence, and to whom the conversation of a New York ball was a six-hours' scream of half-heard sentences, against a band of music and two or three hundred elevated juvenile voices. Those, of course, whose pleasure in vicinity and utterance depended at all on intelligibleness, either of words or sympathies, were soon weary of balls; and, as there was no other form of gaiety, (except "bull-and-bear" dinners, where stocks and stomachs were the only exchanges of magnetism,) they "gave up society."

Owing immediately to what, we could not positively saypossibly, to two or three brilliant women who established appreciative circles which must needs have a sphere in which to revolve, but owing remotely, no doubt, to the rapid Westwardizing of European refinement-there was an understood recognition, in the early part of this winter, of the need of some more adolescent variety in the children's high life of New York. The season opened with what was one result

of this new impulse-a round of balls for dancers only. The more definite indication, however, was a card issued for a series of four parties, on successive Tuesdays, at the house of the most tasteful and accomplished leader of New York society at which there was no dancing and no band of music, no set supper beyond an elegantly-served table to which the guests resorted at pleasure, and no single people invited of the class who dance only. This was a most favorable and successful overture to a new era; for, more brilliant and agreeable parties, than these four, have never been given in this city, and the admiration of the tone and management of them was universal. The Conversation Epoch of society, we may fairly say, is begun.

That our new shape of gaiety will retain, for a while, some color of the former, is to be expected. There are 'teen-ish peculiarities, which foreigners observe in our manners, which will not all vanish with the disunion of school-room and drawing-room. But there is one, which has arisen from the long-endured disproportion between the bands of music and the apartments in which they are heard-a society tone of voice most unmusically loud—to which it is, perhaps, worth while to call attention without leaving it to the slower correction of removed first causes. As most persons know, although they may not have given shape to the idea, it is much more difficult to be agreeable on a strained key of the voice, than when conversing in a natural tone and without need of repetition. The effort and the artificial cadences affect the character of the thoughts expressed. All the tendrils of meaning, in which lie the grace of what is said, are cut off for the sake of brevity, and conversation is reduced to its mere stem a poor representation of what its fair growth should exhibit. It is the commonest remark of a foreigner, that "well-bred people in this country talk singularly loud in society," and this might be variously interpreted -for, while it certainly expresses the innocence of those who are not afraid to be overheard, it might be understood, also, as a dread of betraying, by too timid a tone, a consciousness of superior society. A hint on such a subject, is enough, however, and the charming ease and variety of conversation in which the meaning is aided by the play of tones, will be felt by every lady, the very first time she gives her attention to the experiment.

TWO PLAUSIBLE ARGUMENTS.

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SHAWL ARISTOCRACY.

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THE degree to which ladies care more for each other's opinion of their gentility of appearance, than for the opinion of gentlemen, on the same point, is, at least, equal to the difference between a French shawl and a Cashmere-one worth fifty dollars and the other worth from five hundred to a thousand-for, though no man knows the imitation from the real shawl, as he sees it worn, a fashionable woman without a Cashmere, feels like a recruit unarmed and unequipped. The pilgrimage to Mecca, which entitles to the privilege of wearing the green turban, would not, by the majority of women, be considered too much to undergo for this distinction-recognizable, though it be, by female eyes only. "She had on a real Cashmere" would be sweeter, to numbers of ladies, as a mention when absent, than "she had a beautiful expression about her mouth," or "she had such loveable manners," or "she is always trying to make somebody happier," or she is too contented at home to care much about society." It is, moreover, a portable certificate of character and position. A lady "with a real Cashmere on," would be made way for, at a counter of Stewart's-differently received when introducing herself at a first call-sooner offered the head seat in a pew— differently criticised, as to manners, and very differently estimated in a guess as to who she might be, in any new city or place of public resort where she chanced to be a stranger. The prices of the best Cashmeres vary from four hundred to fifteen hundred dollars.* There are two plausible arguments in their favor, usually pleaded by ladies-first, that they fall in more graceful folds than any other shawl, and have an "undefinable air of elegance," and, second, that, as they never wear out, they are heir-looms which can be bequeathed to daughters. The difference between a thousand dollar shawl given to a daughter after twenty years' wear, and the same thousand dollars invested for a daughter and given to her with twenty years' interest, puts this latter argument upon its

It is a curious foreshadowing of the anticipation of income by which such expensive articles are sometimes obtained, that the finest and costliest of these shawls are made from the down of the lambs taken from the womb before birth.

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