At Oxford, I remember, it was considered very low indeed to gorp.  In fact, we did not allow ourselves to be astonished at anything, unless it was the audacity of trades-people with reference to the payment of their little bills.  Wherefore I the more honour the conduct and courage of a college friend who, honest himself, and as free from humbug as any man I know, was bored, especially in London, by the society of an affected coxcomb, who persisted in attaching himself whenever they met, giving himself all sorts of silly airs, enlarging upon his intimacy with titled folks, and asserting himself to be, like Mrs. Jarley’s show, the delight of the nobility and gentry of the day.  “Gradually,” said my friend to me, “I discovered a process by which I might execute a deed of separation.  First, I rattled my stick against the area railings, and I saw him wince; then I whistled an Ethiopian serenade, and ’o’er his face a tablet of unutterable thoughts was traced’; but when I set my hat well on the back of my head, and gorped with open mouth at six legs of pork in a butcher’s shop, he fled, and I saw him no more.”

Thus did my friend successfully assume the lineaments of a gawk, and the deportment of a gorby, that he might evade the oppressive attentions of a companion given to gawster.  The enemy whom he so adroitly dispersed bore a strong family likeness to a fraternal nuisance, whom we recently inspected, being, in fact, a new edition, on toned paper and elegantly bound, of the braggart, “Brawnging Bill,” and exhibiting the same feeble powers of resistance when his silly conceits were thwarted.  Honest men, hoping reformation, rejoice to see him slink away, rejoice to see the gawsterer subdued, as when Theodore Hook rushed across Fleet Street to one, who was walking as proudly down it as though the Bank of England was his counting-house and St. Paul’s his private Chapel, and, almost breathless with admiring awe, gasped his anxious question—­“O sir, O pray sir, may I ask, sir—­are you anybody in particular?” Certainly it is either a great amusement or a great irritation (as the weather, or disposition, or digestion may influence), to meet with persons in parks, promenades, esplanades, and spas who ostensibly expect you to look at them in an ecstasy of wonder, as though they were a sunset on Mont Blanc or the Balaklava Charge.

Only in three exceptional cases is it permissible, as I think, to gawster.  I like to see a drum-major, with my grandmother’s carriage-muff on his head, and a baton in his hand as long as a bean-rod, swaggering at the head of his regiment, as though he had only to knock at the gates of a besieged city and the governor would instantly send the keys.  Secondly, I was disappointed the other day at the stolid behaviour of a sheep, who went on grazing with a sublime indifference when a peacock, having marched some distance for the purpose, wheeled round within a yard of his nose, displaying his brilliant charms