read "the last novel," which is as much as they can well carry; they
know literary, professional, and scientific men at Somerset House, but,
if they meet them in Park Lane, look as if they never saw them before;
they are very peevish, have something to say against every man, and
always say the worst first; they are very quiet in their manner, almost
sly, and never use any of the colloquialisms of the fast fellows; they
treat their inferiors with great consideration, addressing them, "honest
friend," "my good man," and so on, but have very little heart, and less
spirit.

They equally abhor the fast fellows and the pretenders to fashion. They
are afraid of the former, who are always ridiculing them and their
pursuits, by jokes theoretical and practical. If the fast fellows
ascertain that a slow fellow affects sketching, they club together to
annoy him, talking of the "autumnal tints," and "the gilding of the
western hemisphere;" if a botanist, they send him a cow-cabbage, or a
root of mangel-wurzel, with a serious note, stating, that they hear it
is a great curiosity in _his line_; if an entomologist, they are sure to
send him away "with a flea in his ear." If he affects poetry, the fast
fellows make one of their servants transcribe, from _Bell's Life_,
Scroggins's poetical version of the fight between Bendigo and Bungaree,
or some such stuff; and, having got the slow fellow in a corner, insist
upon having his opinion, and drive him nearly mad. All these, and a
thousand other pranks, the fast fellows play upon their slow brethren,
not in the hackneyed fashion which low people call "_gagging_," and
genteel people "_quizzing_," but with a seriousness and gravity that
heightens all the joke, and makes the slow fellow inexpressibly
ridiculous.

It is astonishing, considering the opportunities of the slow fellows,
that they do not make a better figure; it seems wonderful, that they who
glide swiftly down the current of fortune with wind and tide, should be
distanced by those who, close-hauled upon a wind, are beating up against
it all their lives; but so it is;--the compensating power that rules
material nature, governs the operations of the mind. To whom much is
given of opportunity, little is bestowed of the exertion to improve it.
Those who rely more or less on claims extrinsic, are sure to be
surpassed by those whose power is from within. After all, the great
names of our nation (with here and there an exception to prov