as a bright example, let us
recollect our old friend Joe Stimpson.

Joe Stimpson is a tanner and leather-seller in Bermondsey, the architect
of his own fortune, which he has raised to the respectable elevation of
somewhere about a quarter of a million sterling. He is now in his
seventy-second year, has a handsome house, without and pretension,
overlooking his tanyard. He has a joke upon prospects, calling you to
look from the drawing-room window at his tanpits, asking you if you ever
saw any thing like that at the west end of the town; replying in the
negative, Joe, chuckling, observes that it is the finest prospect _he_
ever saw in his life, and although he has been admiring it for half a
century, he has not done admiring it yet. Joe's capacity for the
humorous may be judged of by this specimen; but in attention to business
few can surpass him, while his hospitality can command a wit whenever he
chooses to angle for one with a good dinner. He has a wife, a venerable
old smiling lady in black silk, neat cap, and polished shoes; three
daughters, unmarried; and a couple of sons, brought up, after the London
fashion, to inherit their father's business, or, we might rather say,
_estate_.

Why the three Miss Stimpsons remain unmarried, we cannot say, nor would
it be decorous to enquire; but hearing them drop a hint now and then
about visits, "a considerable time ago," to Brighthelmstone and Bath, we
are led, however reluctantly in the case of ladies _now_ evangelical, to
conclude, their attention has formerly been directed to
gentility-mongering at these places of fashionable resort; the tanyard
acting as a repellent to husbands of a social position superior to their
own, and their great fortunes operating in deterring worthy persons of
their own station from addressing them; or being the means of inducing
them to be too prompt with refusals, these amiable middle-aged young
ladies are now "on hands," paying the penalty of one of the many curses
that pride of wealth brings in its train. At present, however, their
"affections are set on things above;" and, without meaning any thing
disrespectful to my friend Joe Stimpson, Sarah, Harriet, and Susan
Stimpson are certainly the three least agreeable members of the family.
The sons are, like all other sons in the houses of their fathers,
steady, business-like, unhappy, and dull; they look like fledged birds
in the nest of the old ones, out of place; neither servants nor masters,