h to delight its readers. In fact, _The Snob Papers_
were too good to be brought to an end, and therefore there were
forty-five of them. A dozen would have been better. As he himself says
in his last paper, "for a mortal year we have been together flattering
and abusing the human race." It was exactly that. Of course we
know,--everybody always knows,--that a bad specimen of his order may be
found in every division of society. There may be a snob king, a snob
parson, a snob member of parliament, a snob grocer, tailor, goldsmith,
and the like. But that is not what has been meant. We did not want a
special satirist to tell us what we all knew before. Had snobbishness
been divided for us into its various attributes and characteristics,
rather than attributed to various classes, the end sought,--the
exposure, namely, of the evil,--would have been better attained. The
snobbishness of flattery, of falsehood, of cowardice, lying,
time-serving, money-worship, would have been perhaps attacked to a
better purpose than that of kings, priests, soldiers, merchants, or men
of letters. The assault as made by Thackeray seems to have been made on
the profession generally.

The paper on clerical snobs is intended to be essentially generous, and
is ended by an allusion to certain old clerical friends which has a
sweet tone of tenderness in it. "How should he who knows you, not
respect you or your calling? May this pen never write a pennyworth again
if it ever casts ridicule upon either." But in the meantime he has
thrown his stone at the covetousness of bishops, because of certain
Irish prelates who died rich many years before he wrote. The
insinuation is that bishops generally take more of the loaves and fishes
than they ought, whereas the fact is that bishops' incomes are generally
so insufficient for the requirements demanded of them, that a feeling
prevails that a clergyman to be fit for a bishopric should have a
private income. He attacks the snobbishness of the universities, showing
us how one class of young men consists of fellow-commoners, who wear
lace and drink wine with their meals, and another class consists of
sizars, or servitors, who wear badges, as being poor, and are never
allowed to take their food with their fellow-students. That arrangements
fit for past times are not fit for these is true enough. Consequently
they should gradually be changed; and from day to day are changed. But
there is no snobbishness in this. Was th