第87章

Jawkins, meanwhile, went on blundering, and bragging and boring, quite unconsciously.And so he will, no doubt, go on roaring and braying, to the end of time or at least so long as people will hear him.You cannot alter the nature of men and Snobs by any force of satire; as, by laying ever so many stripes on a donkey's back, you can't turn him into a zebra.

But we can warn the neighbourhood that the person whom they and Jawkins admire is an impostor.We apply the Snob test to him, and try whether he is conceited and a quack, whether pompous and lacking humility--whether uncharitable and proud of his narrow soul? How does he treat a great man--how regard a small one? How does he comport himself in the presence of His Grace the Duke;and how in that of Smith the tradesman?

And it seems to me that all English society is cursed by this mammoniacal superstition; and that we are sneaking and bowing and cringing on the one hand, or bullying and scorning on the other, from the lowest to the highest.

My wife speaks with great circumspection--'proper pride,'

she calls it--to our neighbour the tradesman's lady: and she, I mean Mrs.Snob,--Eliza--would give one of her eyes to go to Court, as her cousin, the Captain's wife, did.

She, again, is a good soul, but it costs her agonies to be obliged to confess that we live in Upper Thompson Street, Somers Town.And though I believe in her heart Mrs.Whiskerington is fonder of us than of her cousins, the Smigsmags, you should hear how she goes on prattling about Lady Smigsmag,--and 'I said to Sir John, my dear John;' and about the Smigsmags' house and parties in Hyde Park Terrace.

Lady Smigsmag, when she meets Eliza,--who is a sort of a kind of a species of a connection of the family, pokes out one finger, which my wife is at liberty to embrace in the most cordial manner she can devise.But oh, you should see her ladyship's behaviour on her first-chop dinner-party days, when Lord and Lady Longears come!

I can bear it no longer--this diabolical invention of gentility which kills natural kindliness and honest friendship.Proper pride, indeed! Rank and precedence, forsooth! The table of ranks and degrees is a lie, and should be flung into the fire.Organize rank and precedence! that was well for the masters of ceremonies of former ages.Come forward, some great marshal, and organize Equality in society, and your rod shall swallow up all the juggling old court goldsticks.If this is not gospel-truth--if the world does not tend to this--if hereditary-great-man worship is not a humbug and an idolatry--let us have the Stuarts back again, and crop the Free Press's ears in the pillory.

If ever our cousins, the Smigsmags, asked me to meet Lord Longears, I would like to take an opportunity after dinner and say, in the most good-natured way in the world:--Sir, Fortune makes you a present of a number of thousand pounds every year.The ineffable wisdom of our ancestors has placed you as a chief and hereditary legislator over me.Our admirable Constitution (the pride of Britons and envy of surrounding nations) obliges me to receive you as my senator, superior, and guardian.