meal of which they formed a regular portion.
England is the only country which enjoys the unspeakable advantage of
being thus regularly, promptly, and accurately furnished with catalogues
of those favoured beings who are deemed qualified to enter the houses of
the great. What condescension in those who impart the information! What
indubitable evidence of true nobility! What superiority to all petty
vanity! And in those who receive it, what freedom from all little
feelings! No arrogance on one side; on the other, no envy. It is only
countries blessed with a free press that can be thus favoured. Even a
free press is not alone sufficient. Besides a free press, you must have
a servile public.

After all, let us be just. The uninitiated world is apt to believe that
there is sometimes, in the outskirts of fashion, an eagerness, scarcely
consistent with self-respect, to enter the mansions of the great. Not at
all: few people really want to go to their grand parties. It is not the
charms of conversation, the flash of wit or the blaze of beauty, the
influential presence of the powerful and celebrated, all the splendour
and refinement, which, combined, offer in a polished saloon so much
to charm the taste and satisfy the intellect, that the mass of social
partisans care anything about. What they want is, not so much to be
in her ladyship's house as in her ladyship's list. After the party at
Coningsby Castle, our friend, Mrs. Guy Flouncey, at length succeeded
in being asked to one of Lady St. Julians' assemblies. It was a great
triumph, and Mrs. Guy Flouncey determined to make the most of it. She
was worthy of the occasion. But alas! next morning, though admitted to
the rout, Mrs. Guy Flouncey was left out of the list! It was a severe
blow! But Mrs. Guy Flouncey is in every list now, and even strikes
out names herself. But there never was a woman who advanced with such
dexterity.

Lord Montacute was much shocked, when, one morning, taking up a journal,
he first saw his name in print. He was alone, and he blushed; felt,
indeed, extremely distressed, when he found that the English people were
formally made acquainted with the fact that he had dined on the previous
Saturday with the Earl and Countess of St. Julians; 'a grand banquet,'
of which he was quite unconscious until he read it; and that he was
afterwards 'observed' at the Opera.

He found that he had become a public character, and he was not by any
means conscious of meri