r six months every year of his life; who does not commit
himself by luxury of raiment or insolence of demeanour, but I think is
as great a Snob as any man on board. Bull passes the season in London,
sponging for dinners, and sleeping in a garret near his Club. Abroad,
he has been everywhere; he knows the best wine at every inn in every
capital in Europe; lives with the best English company there; has seen
every palace and picture-gallery from Madrid to Stockholm; speaks
an abominable little jargon of half-a-dozen languages--and knows
nothing--nothing. Bull hunts tufts on the Continent, and is a sort of
amateur courier. He will scrape acquaintance with old Carabas before
they make Ostend; and will remind his lordship that he met him at Vienna
twenty years ago, or gave him a glass of Schnapps up the Righi. We have
said Bull knows nothing: he knows the birth, arms, and pedigree of all
the peerage, has poked his little eyes into every one of the carriages
on board--their panels noted and their crests surveyed; he knows all the
Continental stories of English scandal--how Count Towrowski ran off
with Miss Baggs at Naples--how VERY thick Lady Smigsmag was with young
Cornichon of the French Legation at Florence--the exact amount which
Jack Deuceace won of Bob Greengoose at Baden--what it is that made the
Staggs settle on the Continent: the sum for which the O'Goggarty
estates are mortgaged, &c. If he can't catch a lord he will hook on to a
baronet, or else the old wretch will catch hold of some beardless young
stripling of fashion, and show him 'life' in various and amiable and
inaccessible quarters. Faugh! the old brute! If he has every one of the
vices of the most boisterous youth, at least he is comforted by having
no conscience. He is utterly stupid, but of a jovial turn, He believes
himself to be quite a respectable member of society: but perhaps the
only good action he ever did in his life is the involuntary one of
giving an example to be avoided, and showing what an odious thing in
the social picture is that figure of the debauched old man who passes
through life rather a decorous Silenus, and dies some day in his garret,
alone, unrepenting, and unnoted, save by his astonished heirs, who find
that the dissolute old miser has left money behind him. See! he is up to
old Carabas already! I told you he would.

Yonder you see the old Lady Mary MacScrew, and those middle-aged young
women her daughters; they are going to cheapen