Now, then, attend to what we are going to say:  London is cursed with no predominating, no overwhelming, no characteristic aristocracy.  There is no set or clique of any sort or description of men that you can point to, and say, that’s the London set.  We turn round and desire to be informed what set do you mean:  every salon has its set, and every pot-house its set also; and the frequenters of each set are neither envious of the position of the other, nor dissatisfied with their own:  the pretenders to fashion, or hangers-on upon the outskirts of high life, are alone the servile set, or spaniel set, who want the proper self-respecting pride which every distinct aristocracy maintains in the World of London.

We are a great firmament, a moonless azure, glowing with stars of all magnitudes, and myriads of nebulae of no magnitudes at all:  we move harmoniously in our several orbits, minding our own business, satisfied with our position, thinking, it may be, with harmless vanity, that we bestow more light upon earth than any ten, and that the eyes of all terrestrial stargazers are upon us.  Adventurers, pretenders, and quacks, are our meteors, our aurorae, our comets, our falling-stars, shooting athwart our hemisphere, and exhaling into irretrievable darkness:  our tuft-hunters are satellites of Jupiter, invisible to the naked eye:  our clear frosty atmosphere that sets us all a-twinkling is prosperity, and we, too have our clouds that hide us from the eyes of men.  The noonday of our own bustling time beholds us dimly; but posterity regards us as it were from the bottom of a well.  Time, that exact observer, applies his micrometer to every one of us, determining our rank among celestial bodies without appeal and from time to time enrolling in his ephemeris such new luminaries as may be vouchsafed to the long succession of ages.

If there is one thing that endears London to men of superior order—­to true aristocrats, no matter of what species, it is that universal equality of outward condition, that republicanism of everyday life, which pervades the vast multitudes who hum, and who drone, who gather honey, and who, without gathering, consume the products of this gigantic hive.  Here you can never be extinguished or put out by any overwhelming interest.

Neither are we in London pushed to the wall by the two or three hundred great men of every little place.  We are not invited to a main of small talk with the cock of his own dung-hill; we are never told, as a great favour, that Mr Alexander Scaldhead, the phrenologist, is to be there, and that we can have our “bumps” felt for nothing; or that the Chevalier Doembrownski (a London pickpocket in disguise) is expected to recite a Polish ode, accompanying himself on the Jew’s harp; we are not bored with the misconduct of the librarian, who never has the first volume of the last new novel, or invited to determine whether