r an example, in the scene from _The Great Hoggarty Diamond_,
the behaviour of Mr. Preston, 'one of her Majesty's Secretaries of
State,' to an underbred but good-tempered little city clerk, whom Lady
Drum takes in her carriage for a drive in Hyde Park, and whom she
hints he might ask to dinner. Mr. Preston acts on the hint, but with
savage sarcasm, and Titmarsh, the clerk, accepts in order to plague
the minister for his astounding rudeness:

'"I did not," he says, "intend to dine with the man, but only to
give him a lesson in manners."'

And so, when the carriage drove up to Mr. Preston's door, he says to
him:

'"When you came up and asked who the devil I was, I thought you
might have put the question in a more polite manner, but it wasn't
my business to speak. When, by way of a joke, you invited me to
dinner, I answered in a joke too, and here I am. But don't be
frightened, I'm not agoing to dine with you."...

'"Is that all, sir?" says Mr. Preston, still in a rage. "If you
have done, will you leave the house, or shall my servants turn you
out? Turn out this fellow; do you hear me?"'

Assuming that sixty years ago a Secretary of State was much the same
sort of man that he is to-day, what are we to think of this spirited
colloquy? and what kind of impression will it, and others no less
forcible, produce upon the future student of manners who turns to
light literature as the mirror of contemporary society?

With regard, again, to the _Yellowplush Papers_, is it from
unpardonable fastidiousness, the affectation of an over-refined
literary taste, that we are inclined to question whether they have
been wisely preserved in standard editions of so great a novelist? The
use of ludicrously distorted spelling intensifies the impression of
ignorant vulgarity, and there is a moral lesson in the story of Mr.
Deuceace that atones in some degree for the very low company whom we
meet in it. But the labour of deciphering the ugly words, and the
cheerless atmosphere of sordid vice and servility which they are most
appropriately used to describe, are so unfamiliar to contemporary
novel-readers that we think few will master two hundred pages of this
dialect in the present edition. On the whole, after renewing our old
acquaintance with Mr. Jeames, with Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon, with
Mr. Stubbs of the Fatal Boots, and others of the same kidney, we doubt
whether these immature chara