to admire the harp, saying that you saw one exactly like it
at Lord (any Lord that strikes you) So-and-So's, in St James's Square.
This produces an invitation to dinner; and with many lamentations on
English weather, and an eulogium on the climate of Florence, you pay
your parting compliments, and take your leave.

At dinner you meet a claret-faced Irish absentee, whose good society is
a good dinner, and who is too happy to be asked any where that a good
dinner is to be had; a young silky clergyman, in black curled whiskers,
and a white _choker_; one of the meaner fry of M.P.'s; a person who
_calls himself_ a foreign count; a claimant of a dormant peerage; a
baronet of some sort, not above the professional; sundry propriety-faced
people in yellow waistcoats, who say little, and whose social position
you cannot well make out; half-a-dozen ladies of an uncertain age,
dressed in grand style, with turbans of imposing _tournure_; and a
young, diffident, equivocal-looking gent who sits at the bottom of the
table, and whom you instinctively make out to be a family doctor, tutor,
or nephew, with expectations. No young ladies, unless the young ladies
of the family, appear at the dinner-parties of these gentility-mongers;
because the motive of the entertainment is pride, not pleasure; and
therefore prigs and frumps are in keeping, and young women with brains,
or power of conversation, would only distract attention from the grand
business of life, that is to say, dinner; besides, a seat at table here
is an object, where the expense is great, and nobody is asked for his or
her own sake, but for an object either of ostentation, interest, or
vanity. Hospitality never enters into the composition of a
gentility-monger: he gives a dinner, wine, and a shake of the hand, but
does not know what the word _welcome_ means: he says, now and then, to
his wife "My dear, I think we must give a dinner;" a dinner is
accordingly determined on, cards issued three weeks in advance, that you
may be premeditatedly dull; the dinner is gorgeous to repletion, that
conversation may be kept as stagnant as possible. Of those happy
surprize invitations--those unexpected extemporaneous dinners, that as
they come without thinking or expectation, so go off with _eclat_, and
leave behind the memory of a cheerful evening--he has no idea; a man of
fashion, whose place is fixed, and who has only himself to please, will
ask you to a slice of crimped cod and a hash of