have said, it will be truly inferred that Dr. Lloyd's early career as a
physician had not been brilliant; but of late years he had gradually
rather aged than worked himself into that professional authority and
station which time confers on a thoroughly respectable man whom no one
is disposed to envy, and all are disposed to like.

Now in L---- there were two distinct social circles,--that of the
wealthy merchants and traders, and that of a few privileged families
inhabiting a part of the town aloof from the marts of commerce, and
called the Abbey Hill. These superb Areopagites exercised over the
wives and daughters of the inferior citizens to whom all of L----,
except the Abbey Hill, owed its prosperity, the same kind of mysterious
influence which the fine ladies of May Fair and Belgravia are reported
to hold over the female denizens of Bloomsbury and Marylebone.

Abbey Hill was not opulent; but it was powerful by a concentration of
its resources in all matters of patronage. Abbey Hill had its own
milliner and its own draper, its own confectioner, butcher, baker, and
tea-dealer; and the patronage of Abbey Hill was like the patronage of
royalty,--less lucrative in itself than as a solemn certificate of
general merit. The shops on which Abbey Hill conferred its custom were
certainly not the cheapest, possibly not the best; but they were
undeniably the most imposing. The proprietors were decorously pompous,
the shopmen superciliously polite. They could not be more so if they had
belonged to the State, and been paid by a public which they benefited and
despised. The ladies of Low Town (as the city subjacent to the Hill had
been styled from a date remote in the feudal ages) entered those shops
with a certain awe, and left them with a certain pride. There they had
learned what the Hill approved; there they had bought what the Hill had
purchased. It is much in this life to be quite sure that we are in the