What Is Luxury?
Luxury is the indefinite and comprehensive term of reproach with which the vulgar, in all ages, brand whatever is beyond their own tastes and habits. What is luxury to one is but refinement and civilization to others. The higher orders mingle up with their disgust at the boorish and noisy pastimes of the lower, a kind of latent feeling of their immorality: the lower revenge themselves by considering as things absolutely sinful the more splendid entertainments and elegant festivities of their superiors in wealth and refinement.—Quarterly Review.