as if he were your father; “whether it is true that we are to have the two Fannies, Taglioni and Cerito, this season; and what a heaven of delight we shall experience from the united action of these twenty supernatural pettitoes.”  You needn’t express yourself after this fashion, else you will shock miss, who lounges near you in an agony of affected rapture:  you must sigh, shrug your shoulders, twirl your cane, and say “divine—­yes—­hope it may be so—­exquisite—­exquisite.”  This naturally leads you to the last new songs, condescendingly exhibited to you by miss, if you are somebody, (if nobody, miss does not appear;) you are informed that “My heart is like a pickled salmon” is dedicated to the Duchess of Mundungus, and thereupon you are favoured with sundry passages (out of Debrett) upon the intermarriages, &c., of that illustrious family; you are asked whether Bishop is the composer of “I saw her in a twinkling,” and whether the minor is not fine?  Miss tells you she has transposed it from G to C, as suiting her voice better—­whereupon mamma acquaints you, that a hundred and twenty guineas for a harp is moderate, she thinks; you think so too, taking that opportunity to admire the harp, saying that you saw one exactly like it at Lord (any Lord that strikes you) So-and-So’s, in St James’s Square.  This produces an invitation to dinner; and with many lamentations on English weather, and an eulogium on the climate of Florence, you pay your parting compliments, and take your leave.

At dinner you meet a claret-faced Irish absentee, whose good society is a good dinner, and who is too happy to be asked any where that a good dinner is to be had; a young silky clergyman, in black curled whiskers, and a white choker; one of the meaner fry of M.P.’s; a person who calls himself a foreign count; a claimant of a dormant peerage; a baronet of some sort, not above the professional; sundry propriety-faced people in yellow waistcoats, who say little, and whose social position you cannot well make out; half-a-dozen ladies of an uncertain age, dressed in grand style, with turbans of imposing tournure; and a young, diffident, equivocal-looking gent who sits at the bottom of the table, and whom you instinctively make out to be a family doctor, tutor, or nephew, with expectations.  No young ladies, unless the young ladies of the family, appear at the dinner-parties of these gentility-mongers; because the motive of the entertainment is pride, not pleasure; and therefore prigs and frumps are in keeping, and young women with brains, or power of conversation, would only distract attention from the grand business of life, that is to say, dinner; besides, a seat at table here is an object, where the expense is great, and nobody is asked for his or her own sake, but for an object either of ostentation, interest, or vanity.  Hospitality never enters into the composition of a gentility-monger:  he gives a dinner, wine, and a shake of the hand, but