Morning journal and courier., 1890-01-27
SOCIETY IN BOSTON,
A Narrow Exclusiveness That Leads
 IO . Wearyins MOnOt0ny.

To begin with, Boston is, socially speaking, the narrowest city in the world, confesses the Boston Herald. The circle that includes rigidly and forbidaingly is its circumference defined that he must have something more than stone heart and fearless soul who ap- proaches it. It is like one of those brisk little omnibuses that rattle over the asphalt
 in Paris on their way to all sorts of delight
 cept that they all wear that discouraging
 sscomplet'' prominently displayed. "Posi-
 lively no admittance," read the doorplates of
 those stately old houses on Beacon Hill,
 where society has it's strongsholds, and
 where the struggling newly rich long to pen
 citrate, and serenely pull the "Four Hun-
 dred" whose ancestors came over in the May
 flower, with no end of impediment in the
 way of clocks, spinning-whesls and claw footed chairs, shake their satisfied heads at all outside it's pale.
 The result is that Boston is monotonous. For those who are not in the fold there can
 be but comparatively little in the way of
 amusemsnts of the higher sort, and even for
 the happy men and women who are so ss.
 curely intrenched in position from which nothing short of revolution could oust them certain monotony hangs about euc- cession of balls and dinners at which one must meet the same people over and over again. The superior fascination of Wash- inpton and New York is set down to the fact that these cities are, above all else, cosmo politan. There one meets distinguished for eigneIs, travellers, savants, statesmen, good and bad, saints and sinners. the vielle roche, and men and women who have had no grand fathers at all, but with ready wits and hril- liant minds. Millionaires and Bohemians, living from hand to mouth, good natured and amusing, beautiful women, some with
 histories. perhaps, poets, painters, sculptors Beacon Hill considers the great unwashed, and, theoretically admiring, practically de- l niss its drawing rooms.
 l Boston ought to have it's salons-its Lady I Palmerston who could gather about her, night after night, the cream of the nineteenth l century, and restore to the Hub it's rapidly | waning prestige as ths intellectual center of 1 the new world. But Boston's aristecratic preiudices render such state of affairs for ever impossible, and the fortunate or unfor- l tunate inheritor of this noblesse oblige is 1 forced whether or no to resign himself to esociety where Middlesexes have married Esssxes and produced Suffolks for two hun dred and fifty years" as MT. Howells admir- ably describes it.
 Once in the swim, there is certain amount
 of entertaining always going on. and this season just beginning is no exception to the
 rule. But it ia not expected to be quite as
 brilliant as usual, first, because great many prominent families who are looked to as l leaders are temporarily taken off the list by the rigid etiquette of mourning, and second. because there is not the appalling number of l buds that are prone to open on Boston's winter air. They might be almost counted on one's fingers and thumbs-that is to say.
 the buds of uppertendom, those costly blos- sons that are guarded in glass houses and