What? there is no deuce!  Deuce take it!  What?  People will go on talking about their neighbors, and won’t have their mouths stopped by cards, or ever so much microscopes and aquariums?  Ah, my poor dear Mrs. Candor, I agree with you.  By the way, did you ever see anything like Lady Godiva Trotter’s dress last night?  People will go on chattering, although we hold our tongues; and, after all, my good soul, what will their scandal matter a hundred years hence?

SMALL-BEER CHRONICLE.

Not long since, at a certain banquet, I had the good fortune to sit by Doctor Polymathesis, who knows everything, and who, about the time when the claret made its appearance, mentioned that old dictum of the grumbling Oxford Don, that “All claret would be port if it could!” Imbibing a bumper of one or the other not ungratefully, I thought to myself, “Here surely, Mr. Roundabout, is a good text for one of your reverence’s sermons.”  Let us apply to the human race, dear brethren, what is here said of the vintages of Portugal and Gascony, and we shall have no difficulty in perceiving how many clarets aspire to be ports in their way; how most men and women of our acquaintance, how we ourselves, are Aquitanians giving ourselves Lusitanian airs; how we wish to have credit for being stronger, braver, more beautiful, more worthy than we really are.

Nay, the beginning of this hypocrisy—­a desire to excel, a desire to be hearty, fruity, generous, strength-imparting—­is a virtuous and noble ambition; and it is most difficult for a man in his own case, or his neighbor’s, to say at what point this ambition transgresses the boundary of virtue, and becomes vanity, pretence, and self-seeking.  You are a poor man, let us say, showing a bold face to adverse fortune, and wearing a confident aspect.  Your purse is very narrow, but you owe no man a penny; your means are scanty, but your wife’s gown is decent; your old coat well brushed; your children at a good school; you grumble to no one; ask favors of no one; truckle to no neighbors on account of their superior rank, or (a worse, and a meaner, and a more common crime still) envy none for their better fortune.  To all outward appearances you are as well to do as your neighbors, who have thrice your income.  There may be in this case some little mixture of pretension in your life and behavior.  You certainly do put on a smiling face whilst fortune is pinching you.  Your wife and girls, so smart and neat at evening parties, are cutting, patching, and cobbling all day to make both ends of life’s haberdashery meet.  You give a friend a bottle of wine on occasion, but are content yourself with a glass of whiskey-and-water.  You avoid a cab, saying that of all things you like to walk home after dinner (which you know, my good friend, is a fib).  I grant you that in this scheme of life there does enter ever so little hypocrisy; that this claret is loaded, as it were; but your desire to PORTIFY yourself is amiable, is pardonable, is perhaps honorable:  and were there no other hypocrisies than yours in the world we should be a set of worthy fellows; and sermonizers, moralizers, satirizers, would have to hold their tongues, and go to some other trade to get a living.