when she comes rustling into church, the obsequious John behind with the
bag of Prayer-books. Is it possible, you would say, that so grand and
awful a personage as that can be hard-up for money? Alas! So it is.

She never heard such a word as Snob, I will engage, in this wicked and
vulgar world. And, O stars and garters! how she would start if she heard
that she--she, as solemn as Minerva--she, as chaste as Diana (without
that heathen goddess's unladylike propensity for field-sports)--that she
too was a Snob!

A Snob she is, as long as she sets that prodigious value upon herself,
upon her name, upon her outward appearance, and indulges in that
intolerable pomposity; as long as she goes parading abroad, like
Solomon in all his glory; as long as she goes to bed--as I believe she
does--with a turban and a bird of paradise in it, and a court train
to her night-gown; as long as she is so insufferably virtuous and
condescending; as long as she does not cut at least one of those footmen
down into mutton-chops for the benefit of the young ladies.

I had my notions of her from my old schoolfellow,--her son Sydney
Scraper--a Chancery barrister without any practice--the most placid,
polite, and genteel of Snobs, who never exceeded his allowance of two
hundred a year, and who may be seen any evening at the 'Oxford and
Cambridge Club,' simpering over the QUARTERLY REVIEW, in the blameless
enjoyment of his half-pint of port.



CHAPTER VII--ON SOME RESPECTABLE SNOBS