Louisa Fitzsmythe or Angelina Stubbsville deserves to be considered the heroine; we are not required to be in raptures because Mrs Alfred Shaw or Clara Novello are expected, or to break our hearts with disappointment because they didn’t come:  the arrival, performances, and departure, of Ducrow’s horses, or Wombwell’s wild beasts, affect us with no extraordinary emotion; even Assizes time concerns most of us nothing.

Then, again, how vulgar, how commonplace in London is the aristocracy of wealth; of Mrs Grub, who, in a provincial town, keeps her carriage, and is at once the envy and the scandal of all the Ladies who have to proceed upon their ten toes, we wot not the existence.  Mr Bill Wright, the banker, the respected, respectable, influential, twenty per cent Wright, in London is merely a licensed dealer in money; he visits at Camberwell Hill, or Hampstead Heath, or wherever other tradesmen of his class delight to dwell; his wife and daughters patronize the Polish balls, and Mr Bill Wright, jun., sports a stall at the (English) opera; we are not overdone by Mr Bill Wright, overcome by Mrs Bill Wright, or the Misses Bill Wright, nor overcrowed by Mr Bill Wright the younger:  in a word, we don’t care a crossed cheque for the whole Bill Wrightish connexion.

What are carriages, or carriage-keeping people in London?  It is not here, as in the provinces, by their carriages shall you know them; on the contrary, the carriage of a duchess is only distinguishable from that of a parvenu, by the superior expensiveness and vulgarity of the latter.

The vulgarity of ostentatious wealth with us, defeats the end it aims at.  That expense which is lavished to impress us with awe and admiration, serves only as a provocative to laughter, and inducement to contempt; where great wealth and good taste go together, we at once recognize the harmonious adaptation of means and ends; where they do not, all extrinsic and adventitious expenditure availeth its disbursers nothing.

What animal on earth was ever so inhumanly preposterous as a lord mayor’s footman, and yet it takes sixty guineas, at the least, to make that poor lick-plate a common laughing-stock?

No, sir; in London we see into, and see through, all sorts of pretension:  the pretension of wealth or rank, whatever kind of quackery and imposture.  When I say we, I speak of the vast multitudes forming the educated, discriminating, and thinking classes of London life.  We pass on to what a man is, over who he is, and what he has; and, with one of the most accurate observers of human character and nature to whom a man of the world ever sat for his portrait—­the inimitable La Bruyere—­when offended with the hollow extravagance of vulgar riches, we exclaim—­“Tu te trompes, Philemon, si avec ce carrosse brillant, ce grand nombre de coquins qui te suivent, et ces six betes qui te trainent, tu penses qu’on t’en estime d’avantage:  ou ecarte tout cet attirail qui t’est etranger, pour penetrer jusq’a toi qui n’es qu’un fat.”