wise aristocracy!
It is sweet to mark your ways, and study your commerce with inferior
men.

I was just going to commence a tirade regarding the aristocracy
here, and to rage against that cool assumption of superiority which
distinguishes their lordships' commerce with artists of all sorts: that
politeness which, if it condescends to receive artists at all, takes
care to have them altogether, so that there can be no mistake about
their rank--that august patronage of art which rewards it with a silly
flourish of knighthood, to be sure, but takes care to exclude it from
any contact with its betters in society--I was, I say, just going to
commence a tirade against the aristocracy for excluding artists from
their company, and to be extremely satirical upon them, for instance,
for not receiving my friend Morgiana, when it suddenly came into my head
to ask, was Mrs. Walker fit to move in the best society?--to which query
it must humbly be replied that she was not. Her education was not such
as to make her quite the equal of Baker Street. She was a kind honest
and clever creature; but, it must be confessed, not refined. Wherever
she went she had, if not the finest, at any rate the most showy gown
in the room; her ornaments were the biggest; her hats, toques, berets,
marabouts, and other fallals, always the most conspicuous. She drops
"h's" here and there. I have seen her eat peas with a knife (and Walker,
scowling on the opposite side of the table, striving in vain to catch
her eye); and I shall never forget Lady Smigsmag's horror when she
asked for porter at dinner at Richmond, and began to drink it out of the
pewter pot. It was a fine sight. She lifted up the tankard with one of
the finest arms, covered with the biggest bracelets ever seen; and had
a bird of paradise on her head, that curled round the pewter disc of the
pot as she raised it, like a halo. These peculiarities she had, and has
still. She is best away from the genteel world, that is the fact. When
she says that "The weather is so 'ot that it is quite debiliating;" when
she laughs, when she hits her neighbour at dinner on the side of the
waistcoat (as she will if he should say anything that amuses her), she
does what is perfectly natural and unaffected on her part, but what
is not customarily done among polite persons, who can sneer at her
odd manners and her vanity, but don't know the kindness, honesty, and
simplicity which distinguish her. This point being admi