Buckingham Palace." These are eagerly bought up by the
gentility-mongers, who burn, or it may be, in the excess of
their loyalty, _eat_ them!

If you pay her a morning visit, you will have some such conversation as
follows.

"Pray, Mr ----, is there any news to-day?"

"Great distress, I understand, throughout the country."

"Indeed--the old story, shocking--very.--Pray, have you heard the
delightful news? The Princess-Royal has actually cut a tooth!"

"Indeed?"

"Yes, I assure you; and the sweet little royal love of a martyr has
borne it like a hero."

"Positively?"

"Positively, I assure you; Doctor Tryiton has just returned from a
consultation with his friend Sir Henry, upon a particularly difficult
case--Lord Scruffskin--case of elephantiasis I think they call it, and
tells me that Sir Henry has arrives express from Windsor with the news."

"Indeed!"

"Do you think, Mr ----, there will be a general illumination?"

"Really, madam, I cannot say."

"_There ought to be_, [with emphasis.] You must know, Mr ----, Dr
Tryiton has forwarded to a high quarter a beautifully bound copy of his
work on ulcerated sore throat; he says there is a great analogy between
ulcers of the throat and den--den--den--something, I don't know
what--teething, in short. If nothing comes of it, Dr Tryiton, thank
Heaven, can do without it; but you know, Mr ----, it may, on a future
occasion, be _useful to our family_."

If there is, in the great world of London, one thing more spirit-sinking
than another, it is to see men condemned, by the necessities of an
overcrowded profession, to sink to the meannesses of pretension for a
desperate accident by which they may insure success. When one has had an
opportunity of being behind the scenes, and knowing what petty shifts,
what poor expedients of living, what anxiety of mind, are at the bottom
of all this empty show, one will not longer marvel that many born for
better things should sink under the difficulties of their position, or
that the newspapers so continually set forth the miserably unprovided
for condition in which they so often are compelled to leave their
families. To dissipate the melancholy that always oppresses us when
constrained to behold the ridiculous antics of the gentility-mongers,
which we chronicle only to endeavour at a reformation--let us contrast
the hospitality of those who, with wiser ambition, keep themselves, as
the saying is, "_to themselves_;" and,