at. And the upshot of the matter was, that a lawyer's
letter came next day, and an action was commenced next week; and that Mr.
Augustus Cooper, after walking twice to the Serpentine for the purpose of
drowning himself, and coming twice back without doing it, made a
confidante of his mother, who compromised the matter with twenty pounds
from the till: which made twenty pounds four shillings and sixpence paid
to Signor Billsmethi, exclusive of treats and pumps. And Mr. Augustus
Cooper went back and lived with his mother, and there he lives to this
day; and as he has lost his ambition for society, and never goes into the
world, he will never see this account of himself, and will never be any
the wiser.

CHAPTER X--SHABBY-GENTEEL PEOPLE

There are certain descriptions of people who, oddly enough, appear to
appertain exclusively to the metropolis. You meet them, every day, in
the streets of London, but no one ever encounters them elsewhere; they
seem indigenous to the soil, and to belong as exclusively to London as
its own smoke, or the dingy bricks and mortar. We could illustrate the
remark by a variety of examples, but, in our present sketch, we will only
advert to one class as a specimen--that class which is so aptly and
expressively designated as 'shabby-genteel.'

Now, shabby people, God knows, may be found anywhere, and genteel people
are not articles of greater scarcity out of London than in it; but this
compound of the two--this shabby-gentility--is as purely local as the
statue at Charing-cross, or the pump at Aldgate. It is worthy of remark,
too, that only men are shabby-genteel; a woman is always either dirty and
slovenly in the extreme, or neat and respectable, however
poverty-stricken in appearance. A very poor man, 'who has seen better
days,' as the phrase goes, is a strange compound of dirty-slovenliness
and wretched attempts at faded smartness.

We will endeavour to explain our conception of the term which forms the
title of this paper. If you meet a man, lounging up Drury-Lane, or
leaning with his back against a post in Long-acre, with his hands in the
pockets of a pair of drab trousers plentifully besprinkled with
grease-spots: the trousers made very full over the boots, and ornamented
with two cords down the outside of each leg--wearing, also, what has been
a brown coat with bright buttons, and a hat very much pinched up at the
side, cocked over his right eye--don't pity him. He is not
s