第13章
ON SOME RESPECTABLE SNOBS
Having received a great deal of obloquy for dragging monarchs, princes, and the respected nobility into the Snob category, I trust to please everybody in the present chapter, by stating my firm opinion that it is among the RESPECTABLE classes of this vast and happy empire that the greatest profusion of Snobs is to be found.I pace down my beloved Baker Street, (I am engaged on a life of Baker, founder of this celebrated street,) I walk in Harley Street (where every other house has a hatchment), Wimpole Street, that is as cheerful as the Catacombs--a dingy Mausoleum of the genteel:--I rove round Regent's Park, where the plaster is patching off the house walls;where Methodist preachers are holding forth to three little children in the green inclosures, and puffy valetudinarians are cantering in the solitary mud:--Ithread the doubtful ZIG-ZAGS of May Fair, where Mrs.
Kitty Lorimer's Brougham may be seen drawn up next door to old Lady Lollipop's belozenged family coach;--I roam through Belgravia, that pale and polite district, where all the inhabitants look prim and correct, and the mansions are painted a faint whity-brown: I lose myself in the new squares and terraces of the brilliant bran-new Bayswater-and-Tyburn-Junction line; and in one and all of these districts the same truth comes across me.I stop before any house at hazard, and say, 'O house, you are inhabited--O knocker, you are knocked at--O undressed flunkey, sunning your lazy calves as you lean against the iron railings, you are paid--by Snobs.' It is a tremendous thought that; and it is almost sufficient to drive a benevolent mind to madness to think that perhaps there is not one in ten of those houses where the 'Peerage' does not lie on the drawing-room table.
Considering the harm that foolish lying book does, Iwould have all the copies of it burned, as the barber burned all Quixote's books of humbugging chivalry.
Look at this grand house in the middle of the square.
The Earl of Loughcorrib lives there: he has fifty thousand a year.A DEJEUNER DANSANT given at his house last week cost, who knows how much? The mere flowers for the room and bouquets for the ladies cost four hundred pounds.That man in drab trousers, coming crying down the stops, is a dun: Lord Loughcorrib has ruined him, and won't see him: that is his lordship peeping through the blind of his study at him now.Go thy ways, Loughcorrib, thou art a Snob, a heartless pretender, a hypocrite of hospitality; a rogue who passes forged notes upon society;--but I am growing too eloquent.
You see that nice house, No.23, where a butcher's boy is ringing the area-bell.He has three muttonchops in his tray.They are for the dinner of a very different and very respectable family; for Lady Susan Scraper, and her daughters, Miss Scraper and Miss Emily Scraper.The domestics, luckily for them, are on board wages--two huge footmen in light blue and canary, a fat steady coachman who is a Methodist, and a butler who would never have stayed in the family but that he was orderly to General Scraper when the General distinguished himself at Walcheren.His widow sent his portrait to the United Service Club, and it is hung up in one of the back dressing-closets there.He is represented at a parlour window with red curtains; in the distance is a whirlwind, in which cannon are firing off; and he is pointing to a chart, on which are written the words 'Walcheren, Tobago.'