Travellers'.'
His son has taken his father's seat in Parliament, and has of course
joined Young England. He is the only man in the country who believes in
the De Mogynses, and sighs for the days when a De Mogyns led the van of
battle. He has written a little volume of spoony puny poems. He wears a
lock of the hair of Laud, the Confessor and Martyr, and fainted when
he kissed the Pope's toe at Rome. He sleeps in white kid-gloves, and
commits dangerous excesses upon green tea.
CHAPTER VIII--GREAT CITY SNOBS
There is no disguising the fact that this series of papers is making
a prodigious sensation among all classes in this Empire. Notes of
admiration (!), of interrogation (?), of remonstrance, approval, or
abuse, come pouring into MR. PUNCH'S box. We have been called to task
for betraying the secrets of three different families of De Mogyns; no
less than four Lady Scrapers have been discovered; and young gentlemen
are quite shy of ordering half-a-pint of port and simpering over the
QUARTERLY REVIEW at the Club, lest they should be mistaken for Sydney
Scraper, Esq. 'What CAN be your antipathy to Baker Street?' asks some
fair remonstrant, evidently writing from that quarter.
'Why only attack the aristocratic Snobs?' says one 'estimable
correspondent: 'are not the snobbish Snobs to have their turn?'--'Pitch
into the University Snobs!' writes an indignant gentleman (who
spelt ELEGANT with two I's)--'Show up the Clerical Snob,' suggests
another.--'Being at "Meurice's Hotel," Paris, some time since,' some wag
hints, 'I saw Lord B. leaning out of the window with his boots in his
hand, and bawling out "GARCON, CIREZ-MOI CES BOTTES." Oughtn't he to be
brought in among the Snobs?'
No; far from it. If his lordship's boots are dirty, it is because he is
Lord B., and walks. There is nothing snobbish in having only one pair of
boots, or a favourite pair; and certainly nothing snobbish in desiring
to have them cleaned. Lord B., in so doing, performed a perfectly
natural and gentlemanlike action; for which I am so pleased with him
that I have had him designed in a favourable and elegant attitude, and
put at the head of this Chapter in the place of honour. No, we are not
personal in these candid remarks. As Phidias took the pick of a score of
beauties before he completed a Venus, so have we to examine, perhaps, a
thousand Snobs, before one is expressed upon paper.
Great City Snobs are the next in the hierarchy, and ought t
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