sarily a man
in what the fashionable sets call good society: we have many lords who
are not men of fashion, and many men of fashion who are not lords.

Professional peers, whether legal, naval, or military, bishops, judges,
and all that class of men who attain by talents, interest, and good
fortune, or all, or any of these, a lofty social position, have no more
to do with the exclusive or merely fashionable sets than you or I. A man
may be a barrister in full practice to-day, an attorney-general
to-morrow, a chief-justice the day after with a peerage: yet his wife
and daughter visit the same people, and are visited by the same people,
that associated with them before. If men of fashion know them, it is
because they have business to transact or favours to seek for, or
because it is part of their system to keep up a qualified intimacy with
all whom they think proper to lift to their own level: but this intimacy
is only extended by the man of birth to the man of talent. His family do
not become people of fashion until the third or fourth generation: he
remains the man of business, the useful, working, practical,
brains-carrying man that he was; and his family, if they are wise, seek
not to become the familiars of the old aristocracy, and if they are
foolish, become the most unfortunate pretenders to fashion. They are too
near to be pleasant; and the gulf which people of hereditary fashion
place between is impassable, even though they flounder up to their necks
in servile mud.

It is the same with baronets, M.P.'s, and all that sort of people. These
handles to men's names go down very well in the country, where it is
imagined that a baronet or an M.P. is, _ex officio_, a man of
consequence, and that, rank being equal, consequence is also equal. In
London, on the contrary, people laugh at the idea of a man pluming
himself upon such distinctions without a difference: in town we have
baronets of all sorts--the "Heathcotes, and such large-acred men," Sir
Watkyn, and the territorial baronetage: then we have the Hanmers, and
others of undoubted fashion, to which their patent is the weakest of
their claims: then we have the military, naval, and medical baronet:
descending, through infinite gradations, we come down to the
tallow-chandling, the gin-spinning, the banking, the pastry-cooking
baronetage.

What is there, what can there be, in common with these widely severed
classes, save that they equally enjoy _Sir_ at the head and