w can you help being the mothers, daughters, &c.
of Snobs, so long as this balderdash is set before you?

You stuff the little rosy foot of a Chinese young lady of fashion into a
slipper that is about the size of a salt-cruet, and keep the poor little
toes there imprisoned and twisted up so long that the dwarfishness
becomes irremediable. Later, the foot would not expand to the natural
size were you to give her a washing-tub for a shoe and for all her life
she has little feet, and is a cripple. Oh, my dear Miss Wiggins, thank
your stars that those beautiful feet of yours--though I declare when you
walk they are so small as to be almost invisible--thank your stars that
society never so practised upon them; but look around and see how
many friends of ours in the highest circles have had their BRAINS so
prematurely and hopelessly pinched and distorted.

How can you expect that those poor creatures are to move naturally when
the world and their parents have mutilated them so cruelly? As long as
a COURT CIRCULAR exists, how the deuce are people whose names are
chronicled in it ever to believe themselves the equals of the cringing
race which daily reads that abominable trash? I believe that ours is the
only country in the world now where the COURT CIRCULAR remains in full
flourish--where you read, 'This day his Royal Highness Prince Pattypan
was taken an airing in his go-cart.' 'The Princess Pimminy was taken a
drive, attended by her ladies of honour, and accompanied by her doll,'
&c. We laugh at the solemnity with which Saint Simon announces that SA
MAJESTE SE MEDICAMENTE AUJOURD'HUI. Under our very noses the same folly
is daily going on. That wonderful and mysterious man, the author of the
COURT CIRCULAR, drops in with his budget at the newspaper offices every
night. I once asked the editor of a paper to allow me to lie in wait and
see him.

I am told that in a kingdom where there is a German King-Consort
(Portugal it must be, for the Queen of that country married a German
Prince, who is greatly admired and respected by the natives), whenever
the Consort takes the diversion of shooting among the rabbit-warrens of
Cintra, or the pheasant-preserve of Mafra, he has a keeper to load his
guns, as a matter of course, and then they are handed to the nobleman,
his equerry, and the nobleman hands them to the Prince who blazes
away--gives back the discharged gun to the nobleman, who gives it to the
keeper, and so on. But the Prince