y the Snob test to him, and try whether he
is conceited and a quack, whether pompous and lacking humility--whether
uncharitable and proud of his narrow soul? How does he treat a great
man--how regard a small one? How does he comport himself in the presence
of His Grace the Duke; and how in that of Smith the tradesman?

And it seems to me that all English society is cursed by this
mammoniacal superstition; and that we are sneaking and bowing and
cringing on the one hand, or bullying and scorning on the other,
from the lowest to the highest. My wife speaks with great
circumspection--'proper pride,' she calls it--to our neighbour the
tradesman's lady: and she, I mean Mrs. Snob,--Eliza--would give one of
her eyes to go to Court, as her cousin, the Captain's wife, did. She,
again, is a good soul, but it costs her agonies to be obliged to confess
that we live in Upper Thompson Street, Somers Town. And though I believe
in her heart Mrs. Whiskerington is fonder of us than of her cousins,
the Smigsmags, you should hear how she goes on prattling about Lady
Smigsmag,--and 'I said to Sir John, my dear John;' and about the
Smigsmags' house and parties in Hyde Park Terrace.

Lady Smigsmag, when she meets Eliza,--who is a sort of a kind of a
species of a connection of the family, pokes out one finger, which my
wife is at liberty to embrace in the most cordial manner she can devise.
But oh, you should see her ladyship's behaviour on her first-chop
dinner-party days, when Lord and Lady Longears come!

I can bear it no longer--this diabolical invention of gentility which
kills natural kindliness and honest friendship. Proper pride, indeed!
Rank and precedence, forsooth! The table of ranks and degrees is a lie,
and should be flung into the fire. Organize rank and precedence! that
was well for the masters of ceremonies of former ages. Come forward,
some great marshal, and organize Equality in society, and your rod
shall swallow up all the juggling old court goldsticks. If this is
not gospel-truth--if the world does not tend to this--if
hereditary-great-man worship is not a humbug and an idolatry--let us
have the Stuarts back again, and crop the Free Press's ears in the
pillory.

If ever our cousins, the Smigsmags, asked me to meet Lord Longears,
I would like to take an opportunity after dinner and say, in the most
good-natured way in the world:--Sir, Fortune makes you a present of
a number of thousand pounds every year. The ineffable w