oint
sharply social distinctions, young Corey says to his father,--

"I don't believe Mrs, Lapham ever gave a dinner."

"And with all that money!" sighed the father.

"I don't believe they have the habit of wine at table. I suspect that
when they don't drink tea and coffee with their dinner they drink
ice-water."

"Horrible!" said Bromfield Corey.

"It appears to me that this defines them."

The Coreys have the liveliest sense of all these _nuances_ of deviation
from their standards, and strike us as rather amateurish, clever people
who want to make sure of nice points and get on in the world, rather
than as real flesh-and-blood aristocrats with the freedom and ease of
acknowledged social supremacy.

While the Coreys try faithfully to compass the best that is known and
thought in the world, the Laphams go to the other extreme, and touch
depths of ignorance and vulgarity almost incredible for a family living
in Boston with eyes to see, ears to hear, and, above all, money to
spend. For a sort of superficial culture is a part of the modern
inheritance, and seems to belong to the universal air. Even Penelope
Lapham--the elder daughter, who is a girl of remarkable shrewdness and
gifted besides with a keen satirical sense which makes her the family
wit--is content to laugh at the family failings and provincialisms
without any definite idea of how they might be corrected. But the
Laphams are all the more interesting because they display no feeble and
tentative gentilities. Mrs. Lapham's acceptance of Mrs. Corey's
invitation to dinner, in which she signs herself "Yours truly, Mrs. S.
Lapham," initiates some delightful scenes in the comedy. The colonel's
resolution to go to the dinner in a frock-coat, white waistcoat, black
cravat, and ungloved hands, and his eventual panicky substitution of
correct evening dress regardless of cost, the anxieties of his wife and
daughter on the question of suitable raiment, the great affair itself,
when the colonel comes out in a new character,--all this part of the
book shows in a high degree Mr. Howells's bright vein of humor.

But, putting aside the humor and comedy of "The Rise of Silas Lapham,"
the book has other points of value, and, as a study of a business-man
whom success floats to the crest of the wave only to let him be
overwhelmed by disaster as the surge retreats, presents a striking
similitude to Balzac's "Cesar Birotteau." In each case we find a
self-made man elated by a