Waggle are both idle. They come of the middle classes.
One of them very likely makes believe to be a barrister, and the other
has smart apartments about Piccadilly. They are a sort of second-chop
dandies; they cannot imitate that superb listlessness of demeanour, and
that admirable vacuous folly which distinguish the noble and high-born
chiefs of the race; but they lead lives almost as bad (were it but for
the example), and are personally quite as useless. I am not going to
arm a thunderbolt, and launch it at the beads of these little Pall
Mall butterflies. They don't commit much public harm, or private
extravagance. They don't spend a thousand pounds for diamond earrings
for an Opera-dancer, as Lord Tarquin can: neither of them ever set up a
public-house or broke the bank of a gambling-club, like the young Earl
of Martingale. They have good points, kind feelings, and deal honourably
in money-transactions--only in their characters of men of second-rate
pleasure about town, they and their like are so utterly mean,
self-contented, and absurd, that they must not be omitted in a work
treating on Snobs.

Wiggle has been abroad, where he gives you to understand that his
success among the German countesses and Italian princesses, whom he met
at the TABLES-D'HOTE, was perfectly terrific. His rooms are hung round
with pictures of actresses and ballet-dancers. He passes his mornings
in a fine dressing-gown, burning pastilles, and reading 'Don Juan' and
French novels (by the way, the life of the author of 'Don Juan,' as
described by himself, was the model of the life of a Snob). He has
twopenny-halfpenny French prints of women with languishing eyes, dressed
in dominoes,--guitars, gondolas, and so forth,--and tells you stories
about them.

'It's a bad print,' says he, 'I know, but I've a reason for liking it.
It reminds me of somebody--somebody I knew in other climes. You have
heard of the Principessa di Monte Pulciano? I met her at Rimini. Dear,
dear Francesca! That fair-haired, bright-eyed thing in the Bird of
Paradise and the Turkish Simar with the love-bird on her finger, I'm
sure must have been taken from--from somebody perhaps whom you don't
know--but she's known at Munich, Waggle my boy,--everybody knows the
Countess Ottilia de Eulenschreckenstein. Gad, sir, what a beautiful
creature she was when I danced with her on the birthday of Prince Attila
of Bavaria, in '44. Prince Carloman was our vis-a-vis, and Prince
Pepin danc