LITMIR.BIZ

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'Damiens;' 'The Faggot of Joan of Arc;' and 'Translations from the German' of course). The conversazione-women salute each other calling each other 'My dear Lady Ann' and 'My dear good Eliza,' and hating each other, as women hate who give parties on Wednesdays and Fridays. With inexpressible pain dear good Eliza sees Ann go up and coax and wheedle Abou Gosh, who has just arrived from Syria, and beg him to patronize her Fridays.

      All this while, amidst the crowd and the scuffle, and a perpetual buzz and chatter, and the flare of the wax-candles, and an intolerable smell of musk--what the poor Snobs who write fashionable romances call 'the gleam of gems, the odour of perfumes, the blaze of countless lamps'--a scrubby-looking, yellow-faced foreigner, with cleaned gloves, is warbling inaudibly in a corner, to the accompaniment of another. 'The Great Cacafogo,' Mrs. Botibol whispers, as she passes you by. 'A great creature, Thumpenstrumpff, is at the instrument--the Hetman Platoff's pianist, you know.'

      To hear this Cacafogo and Thumpenstrumpff, a hundred people are gathered together--a bevy of dowagers, stout or scraggy; a faint sprinkling of misses; six moody-looking lords, perfectly meek and solemn; wonderful foreign Counts, with bushy whiskers and yellow faces, and a great deal of dubious jewellery; young dandies with slim waists and open necks, and self-satisfied simpers, and flowers in their buttons; the old, stiff, stout, bald-headed CONVERSAZIONE ROUES, whom You meet everywhere--who never miss a night of this delicious enjoyment; the three last-caught lions of the season--Higgs, the traveller, Biggs, the novelist, and Toffey, who has come out so on the sugar question; Captain Flash, who is invited on account of his pretty wife and Lord Ogleby, who goes wherever she goes.

      QUE SCAIS-JE? Who are the owners of all those showy scarfs and white neckcloths?--Ask little Tom Prig, who is there in all his glory, knows everybody, has a story about every one; and, as he trips home to his lodgings in Jermyn Street, with his gibus-hat and his little glazed pumps, thinks he is the fashionablest young fellow in town, and that he really has passed a night of exquisite enjoyment.

      You go up (with our usual easy elegance of manner) and talk to Miss Smith in a corner. 'Oh, Mr. Snob, I'm afraid you're sadly satirical.'

      That's all she says. If you say it's fine weather, she bursts out laughing; or hint that it's very hot, she vows you are the drollest wretch! Meanwhile Mrs. Botibol is simpering on fresh arrivals; the individual at the door is roaring out their names; poor Cacafogo is quavering away in the music-room, under the impression that he will be LANCE in the world by singing inaudibly here. And what a blessing it is to squeeze out of the door, and into the street, where a half-hundred of carriages are in waiting; and where the link-boy, with that unnecessary lantern of his, pounces upon all who issue out, and will insist upon getting your noble honour's lordship's cab.

      And to think that there are people who, after having been to Botibol on Wednesday, will go to Clutterbuck on Friday!

      CHAPTER XIX--DINING-OUT SNOBS

      In England Dinner-giving Snobs occupy a very important place in society, and the task of describing them is tremendous. There was a time in my life when the consciousness of having eaten a man's salt rendered me dumb regarding his demerits, and I thought it a wicked act and a breach of hospitality to speak ill of him.

      But why should a saddle-of-mutton blind you, or a turbot and lobster-sauce shut your mouth for ever? With advancing age, men see their duties more clearly. I am not to be hoodwinked any longer by a slice of venison, be it ever so fat; and as for being dumb on account of turbot and lobster-sauce----of course I am; good manners ordain that I should be so, until I have swallowed the compound--but not afterwards; directly the victuals are discussed, and John takes away the plate, my tongue begins to wag. Does not yours, if you have a pleasant neighbour?--a lovely creature, say, of some five-and-thirty, whose daughters have not yet quite come out--they are the best talkers. As for your young misses, they are only put about the table to look at--like the flowers in the centre-piece. Their blushing youth and natural modesty preclude them from easy, confidential, conversational ABANDON which forms the delight of the intercourse with their dear mothers. It is to these, if he would prosper in his profession, that the Dining-out Snob should address himself. Suppose you sit next to one of these, how pleasant it is, in the intervals of the banquet, actually to abuse the victuals and the giver of the entertainment! It's twice as PIQUANT to make fun of a man under his very nose.

      'What IS a Dinner-giving Snob?' some innocent youth, who is not REPANDU in the world, may ask--or some simple reader who has not the benefits of London experience.

      My dear sir, I will show you--not all, for that is impossible--but several kinds of Dinner-giving Snobs. For instance, suppose you, in the middle rank of life, accustomed to Mutton, roast on Tuesday, cold on Wednesday, hashed on Thursday, &c., with small means and a small establishment, choose to waste the former and set the latter topsy-turvy by giving entertainments unnaturally costly--you come into the Dinner-giving Snob class at once. Suppose you get in cheap-made dishes from the pastrycook's, and hire a couple of greengrocers, or carpet-beaters, to figure as footmen, dismissing honest Molly, who waits on common days, and bedizening your table (ordinarily ornamented with willow-pattern crockery) with twopenny-halfpenny Birmingham plate. Suppose you pretend to be richer and grander than you ought to be--you are a Dinner-giving Snob. And oh, I tremble to think how many and many a one will read this!

      A man who entertains in this way--and, alas, how few do not!--is like a fellow who would borrow his neighbour's coat to make a show in, or a lady who flaunts in the diamonds from next door--a humbug, in a word, and amongst the Snobs he must be set down.

      A man who goes out of his natural sphere of society to ask Lords, Generals, Aldermen, and other persons of fashion, but is niggardly of his hospitality towards his own equals, is a Dinner-giving Snob. My dear friend, Jack Tufthunt, for example, knows ONE Lord whom he met at a watering-place: old Lord Mumble, who is as toothless as a three-months-old baby, and as mum as an undertaker, and as dull as--well, we will not particularise. Tufthunt never has a dinner now but you see this solemn old toothless patrician at the right-hand of Mrs. Tufthunt--Tufthunt is a Dinner-giving Snob.

      Old Livermore, old Soy, old Chutney, the East Indian Director, old Cutler, the Surgeon, &c.,--that society of old fogies, in fine, who give each other dinners round and round, and dine for the mere purpose of guttling--these, again, are Dinner-giving Snobs.

      Again, my friend Lady MacScrew, who has three grenadier flunkeys in lace round the table, and serves up a scrag-of-mutton on silver, and dribbles you out bad sherry and port by thimblefuls, is a Dinner-giving Snob of the other sort; and I confess, for my part, I would rather dine with old Livermore or old Soy than with her Ladyship.

      Stinginess is snobbish. Ostentation is snobbish. Too great profusion is snobbish. Tuft-hunting is snobbish. But I own there are people more snobbish than all those whose defects are above mentioned: viz., those individuals who can, and don't give dinners at all. The man without hospitality shall never sit SUB IISDEM TRABIBUS with ME. Let the sordid wretch go mumble his bone alone!

      What, again, is true hospitality? Alas, my dear friends and brother Snobs! how little do we meet of it after all! Are the motives PURE which induce your friends to ask you to dinner? This has often come across me. Does your entertainer want something from you? For instance, I am not of a suspicious turn; but it IS a fact that when Hookey is bringing out a new work, he asks the critics all round to dinner; that when Walker has got his picture ready for the Exhibition, he somehow grows exceedingly hospitable, and has his friends of the press to a quiet cutlet and a glass of Sillery. Old Hunks, the miser, who died lately (leaving his money to his housekeeper) lived many years on the fat of the land, by simply taking down, at all his friends', the names and Christian names OF ALL THE CHILDREN. But though you may have your own opinion about the hospitality of your acquaintances; and though men who ask you from sordid motives are most decidedly Dinner-giving Snobs, it is best not to inquire into their motives too keenly. Be not too curious about the mouth of a gift-horse. After all, a man does not intend to insult you by asking you to dinner.

      Though, for that matter, I know some characters about town who actually consider themselves injured and insulted if the dinner or the company is not to their liking. There is

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