66 ENGLISH OPINION society to our late venerated queen. Not to insist on the admirable example she set in her exact performance of all the domestic duties ; her public conduct, in one important instance, will ever re- flect honour on her memory- we mean her solicitude to prevent the impure mixtures to which we are now alluding. She raised, as it were, a rampart between vice and virtue ; and her strictness in excluding from the royal presence those who had forfeited their claim to be in- troduced to it, had a general moral effect, by excluding them also from the virtuous society of others of their own rank. Discriminations of this nature are of incalculable value in preserving the distinctions between correctness and im- purity, when no offender, though of the highest rank, canpreserve the public dig- nity of the station she has dishonoured. " 'Twas hard, perhaps, on here and there a waif, Desirous to return, and not received ; But was an wholesome rigour in the main, And taught th' unblemish'd to preserve with care That purity, whose loss was loss of all." COWPER.
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