upon rich veins of snob-ore.
Snobbishness is like Death, in a quotation from Horace, which I hope you
never heard, 'beating with equal foot at poor men's doors, and kicking
at the gates of emperors.' It is a great mistake to judge of snobs
lightly, and think they exist among the lower classes merely. An immense
percentage of snobs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this
mortal life. You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of snobs; to do so
shows that you are yourself a snob. I myself have been taken for one."

The state of Thackeray's mind when he commenced his delineations of
snobbery is here accurately depicted. Written, as these papers were, for
_Punch_, and written, as they were, by Thackeray, it was a necessity
that every idea put forth should be given as a joke, and that the satire
on society in general should be wrapped up in burlesque absurdity. But
not the less eager and serious was his intention. When he tells us, at
the end of the first chapter, of a certain Colonel Snobley, whom he met
at "Bagnigge Wells," as he says, and with whom he was so disgusted that
he determined to drive the man out of the house, we are well aware that
he had met an offensive military gentleman,--probably at Tunbridge.
Gentlemen thus offensive, even though tamely offensive, were peculiarly
offensive to him. We presume, by what follows, that this gentleman,
ignorantly,--for himself most unfortunately,--spoke of Public[=o]la.
Thackeray was disgusted,--disgusted that such a name should be lugged
into ordinary conversation at all, and then that a man should talk about
a name with which he was so little acquainted as not to know how to
pronounce it. The man was therefore a snob, and ought to be put down; in
all which I think that Thackeray was unnecessarily hard on the man, and
gave him too much importance.

So it was with him in his whole intercourse with snobs,--as he calls
them. He saw something that was distasteful, and a man instantly became
a snob in his estimation. "But you _can_ draw," a man once said to him,
there having been some discussion on the subject of Thackeray's art
powers. The man meant no doubt to be civil, but meant also to imply that
for the purpose needed the drawing was good enough, a matter on which he
was competent to form an opinion. Thackeray instantly put the man down
as a snob for flattering him. The little courtesies of the world and the
little discourtesies became snobbish to him. A man could not