How can you expect that those poor creatures are to move naturally when
the world and their parents have mutilated them so cruelly? As long as
a COURT CIRCULAR exists, how the deuce are people whose names are
chronicled in it ever to believe themselves the equals of the cringing
race which daily reads that abominable trash? I believe that ours is the
only country in the world now where the COURT CIRCULAR remains in full
flourish--where you read, 'This day his Royal Highness Prince Pattypan
was taken an airing in his go-cart.' 'The Princess Pimminy was taken a
drive, attended by her ladies of honour, and accompanied by her doll,'
&c. We laugh at the solemnity with which Saint Simon announces that SA
MAJESTE SE MEDICAMENTE AUJOURD'HUI. Under our very noses the same folly
is daily going on. That wonderful and mysterious man, the author of the
COURT CIRCULAR, drops in with his budget at the newspaper offices every
night. I once asked the editor of a paper to allow me to lie in wait and
see him.

I am told that in a kingdom where there is a German King-Consort
(Portugal it must be, for the Queen of that country married a German
Prince, who is greatly admired and respected by the natives), whenever
the Consort takes the diversion of shooting among the rabbit-warrens of
Cintra, or the pheasant-preserve of Mafra, he has a keeper to load his
guns, as a matter of course, and then they are handed to the nobleman,
his equerry, and the nobleman hands them to the Prince who blazes
away--gives back the discharged gun to the nobleman, who gives it to the
keeper, and so on. But the Prince WON'T TAKE THE GUN FROM THE HANDS OF
THE LOADER.

As long as this unnatural and monstrous etiquette continues, Snobs there
must be. The three persons engaged in this transaction are, for the time