This veteran investigator, this hoary and venerable Doctor, would cheerfully give years off his life if only the various philosophers who from time to time sit at his feet would recognise that those feet are small, and compliment him on the fact.  They are small, there is no doubt of it, but not small enough to be encased without agony in the tiny, natty, pointed boots that he habitually wears.  Let anybody who wants to get anything out of Dr. PEAGAM lead the conversation craftily on to the subject of feet and their proper size.  Let him then make the discovery (aloud) that the Doctor’s feet are extraordinarily small and beautiful, and I warrant that there is nothing the Doctor can bestow which shall not be freely offered to this cunning flatterer.  That is why Dr. PEAGAM, a modest man in most respects, always insists on sitting in the front row on any platform, and ostentatiously dusts his boots with a red silk pocket-handkerchief.

Then, again, who is there that has not heard of Major-General WHACKLEY, V.C., the hero who captured the ferocious Ameer of Mudwallah single-handed, and carried him on his back to the English camp—­the man to whose dauntless courage, above all others, the marvellous victory of Pilferabad was due?  Speak to him on military matters, and you will find the old warrior as shy as a school-girl; but only mention the word poetry, and you’ll have him reciting his ballads and odes to you by the dozen, and declaiming for hours together about the obtuseness of the publishing fraternity.

I don’t speak now of literary men who value themselves above LAMB, DICKENS, and THACKERAY, rolled into one; nor of artists who sneer at TITIAN; nor of actors who hold GARRICK to be absurdly overrated.  Space would fail me, and patience you.  But let me just for a brief moment call to your mind ROLAND PRETTYMAN.  Upon my soul, I think ROLAND the most empty-headed fribble, the most affected coxcomb, and the most conceited noodle in the whole world.  He was decently good-looking once, and he had a pretty knack of sketching in water-colours.

But oh, the huge, distorted, overweening conceit of the man!  I have seen him lying full length on a couch, waving a scented handkerchief amongst a crowd of submissive women, who were grovelling round him, while he enlarged in his own pet jargon on the surpassing merits of his latest unpublished essay, or pointed out the beauties of the trifling pictures which were the products of his ineffective brush.  He will never accomplish anything, and yet to the end of his life, I fancy, he will have his circle of toadies and flatterers who will pretend to accept him as the evangelist of a glorious literary and artistic gospel.  For unfortunately he is as rich as he is impudent and incompetent.  And when he drives out in a Hansom he never ceases to simper at his reflected image in the little corner looking-glasses, by means of which modern cab-proprietors pander to the weakness of men.  Such is your handiwork, my excellent VANITY.  Are you proud of it?