[48] In a wax-chandler’s shop in Piccadilly, opposite St. James’s Street, may be seen stumps, or, as the Scotch call them, doups of wax-lights, with the announcement “Candle-ends from Buckingham Palace.”  These are eagerly bought up by the gentility-mongers, who burn, or it may be, in the excess of their loyalty, eat them!

If you pay her a morning visit, you will have some such conversation as follows.

“Pray, Mr ——­, is there any news to-day?”

“Great distress, I understand, throughout the country.”

“Indeed—­the old story, shocking—­very.—­Pray, have you heard the delightful news?  The Princess-Royal has actually cut a tooth!”

“Indeed?”

“Yes, I assure you; and the sweet little royal love of a martyr has borne it like a hero.”

“Positively?”

“Positively, I assure you; Doctor Tryiton has just returned from a consultation with his friend Sir Henry, upon a particularly difficult case—­Lord Scruffskin—­case of elephantiasis I think they call it, and tells me that Sir Henry has arrives express from Windsor with the news.”

“Indeed!”

“Do you think, Mr ——­, there will be a general illumination?”

“Really, madam, I cannot say.”

“There ought to be, [with emphasis.] You must know, Mr ——­, Dr Tryiton has forwarded to a high quarter a beautifully bound copy of his work on ulcerated sore throat; he says there is a great analogy between ulcers of the throat and den—­den—­den—­something, I don’t know what—­teething, in short.  If nothing comes of it, Dr Tryiton, thank Heaven, can do without it; but you know, Mr ——­, it may, on a future occasion, be useful to our family.”

If there is, in the great world of London, one thing more spirit-sinking than another, it is to see men condemned, by the necessities of an overcrowded profession, to sink to the meannesses of pretension for a desperate accident by which they may insure success.  When one has had an opportunity of being behind the scenes, and knowing what petty shifts, what poor expedients of living, what anxiety of mind, are at the bottom of all this empty show, one will not longer marvel that many born for better things should sink under the difficulties of their position, or that the newspapers so continually set forth the miserably unprovided for condition in which they so often are compelled to leave their families.  To dissipate the melancholy that always oppresses us when constrained to behold the ridiculous antics of the gentility-mongers, which we chronicle only to endeavour at a reformation—­let us contrast the hospitality of those who, with wiser ambition, keep themselves, as the saying is, “to themselves;” and, as a bright example, let us recollect our old friend Joe Stimpson.