lmost impossible for the descending
stick to go anywhere save down his throat.

But we are all of us naturally fond of gorping. We abstain in our
sensitive days, because somebody said it was vulgar; but, as we grow
older and wiser, and that bell-wether Fashion tinkles vainly in our
ears, we flatten our happy noses upon the shop-windows once again, and
thoroughly enjoy our _gorp_.

At Oxford, I remember, it was considered very low indeed to gorp. In
fact, we did not allow ourselves to be astonished at anything, unless it
was the audacity of trades-people with reference to the payment of their
little bills. Wherefore I the more honour the conduct and courage of a
college friend who, honest himself, and as free from humbug as any man I
know, was bored, especially in London, by the society of an affected
coxcomb, who persisted in attaching himself whenever they met, giving
himself all sorts of silly airs, enlarging upon his intimacy with titled
folks, and asserting himself to be, like Mrs. Jarley's show, the delight
of the nobility and gentry of the day. "Gradually," said my friend to
me, "I discovered a process by which I might execute a deed of
separation. First, I rattled my stick against the area railings, and I
saw him wince; then I whistled an Ethiopian serenade, and 'o'er his face
a tablet of unutterable thoughts was traced'; but when I set my hat well
on the back of my head, and _gorped_ with open mouth at six legs of pork
in a butcher's shop, he fled, and I saw him no more."

Thus did my friend successfully assume the lineaments of a _gawk_, and
the deportment of a _gorby_, that he might evade the oppressive
attentions of a companion given to _gawster_. The enemy whom he so
adroitly dispersed bore a strong family likeness to a fraternal
nuisance, whom we recently inspected, being, in fact, a new edition, on
toned paper and elegantly bound, of the braggart, "Brawnging Bill," and
exhibiting the same feeble powers of resistance when his silly conceits
were thwarted. Honest men, hoping reformation, rejoice to see him slink
away, rejoice to see the _gawsterer_ subdued, as when Theodore Hook
rushed across Fleet Street to one, who was walking as proudly down it as
though the Bank of England was his counting-house and St. Paul's his
private Chapel, and, almost breathless with admiring awe, gasped his
anxious question--"O sir, O pray sir, may I ask, sir--are you anybody in
particular?" Certainly it is either a great amuse