rs-out, and is contradicted in turn by the
baronet; the foreign count is in deep conversation with a hard-featured
man, supposed to be a stockjobber; the clergyman extols the labours of
the host in the matter of the Cannibal Islands' Aborigines Protection
Society, in which his reverence takes an interest; the claimant of the
dormant peerage retails his pedigree, pulling to pieces the
attorney-general, who has expressed an opinion hostile to his
pretensions.

In the mean time, the piano is joined by a harp, in musical solicitation
of the company to join the ladies in the drawing-room; they do so,
looking flushed and plethoric, sink into easy-chairs, sip tea, the
younger beaux turning over, with miss, Books of Beauty and Keepsakes: at
eleven, coaches and cabs arrive, you take formal leave, expressing with
a melancholy countenance your sense of the delightfulness of the
evening, get to your chambers, and forget, over a broiled bone and a
bottle of Dublin stout, in what an infernal, prosy, thankless,
stone-faced, yellow-waistcoated, unsympathizing, unintellectual,
selfish, stupid set you have been condemned to pass an afternoon,
assisting, at the ostentatious exhibition of vulgar wealth, where
gulosity has been unrelieved by one single sally of wit, humour,
good-nature, humanity, or charity; where you come without a welcome, and
leave without a friend.

The whole art of the gentility-mongers of all sorts in London, and _a
fortiori_ of their wives and families, is to lay a tax upon social
intercourse as nearly as possible amounting to a prohibition; their
dinners are criminally wasteful, and sinfully extravagant to this end;
to this end they insist on making _price_ the test of what they are
pleased to consider _select society_ in their own sets, and they
consequently cannot have a dance without guinea tickets nor a _pic-nic_
without dozens of champagne. This shows their native ignorance and
vulgarity more than enough; genteel people go upon a plan directly
contrary, not merely enjoying themselves, but enjoying themselves
without extravagance or waste: in this respect the gentility-mongers
would do well to imitate people of fashion.

The exertions a gentility-monger will make, to rub his skirts against
people above him; the humiliations, mortifications, snubbing, he will
submit to, are almost incredible. One would hardly believe that a
retired tradesman, of immense wealth, and enjoying all the respect that
immense wealth