shing of
Lizzie Hexam,--and therefore Veneering must recall the present sheep
to the pen from which they have strayed. Who so fit to discourse of
the happiness of Mr and Mrs Lammle, they being the dearest and oldest
friends he has in the world; or what audience so fit for him to take
into his confidence as that audience, a noun of multitude or signifying
many, who are all the oldest and dearest friends he has in the world?
So Veneering, without the formality of rising, launches into a familiar
oration, gradually toning into the Parliamentary sing-song, in which he
sees at that board his dear friend Twemlow who on that day twelvemonth
bestowed on his dear friend Lammle the fair hand of his dear friend
Sophronia, and in which he also sees at that board his dear friends
Boots and Brewer whose rallying round him at a period when his dear
friend Lady Tippins likewise rallied round him--ay, and in the foremost
rank--he can never forget while memory holds her seat. But he is free
to confess that he misses from that board his dear old friend Podsnap,
though he is well represented by his dear young friend Georgiana. And he
further sees at that board (this he announces with pomp, as if exulting
in the powers of an extraordinary telescope) his friend Mr Fledgeby, if
he will permit him to call him so. For all of these reasons, and many
more which he right well knows will have occurred to persons of your
exceptional acuteness, he is here to submit to you that the time has
arrived when, with our hearts in our glasses, with tears in our eyes,
with blessings on our lips, and in a general way with a profusion of
gammon and spinach in our emotional larders, we should one and all drink
to our dear friends the Lammles, wishing them many years as happy as
the last, and many many friends as congenially united as themselves. And
this he will add; that Anastatia Veneering (who is instantly heard to
weep) is formed on the same model as her old and chosen friend Sophronia
Lammle, in respect that she is devoted to the man who wooed and won her,
and nobly discharges the duties of a wife.

Seeing no better way out of it, Veneering here pulls up his oratorical
Pegasus extremely short, and plumps down, clean over his head, with:
'Lammle, God bless you!'

Then Lammle. Too much of him every way; pervadingly too much nose of a
coarse wrong shape, and his nose in his mind and his manners; too much
smile to be real; too much frown to be false; too many l