Mr. Tinman, however, this high-stepping person in question, happened to have come of a marketing mother.  She had started him from a small shop to a big one.  He, by the practice of her virtues, had been enabled to start himself as a gentleman.  He was a man of this ambition, and prouder behind it.  But having started himself precipitately, he took rank among independent incomes, as they are called, only to take fright at the perils of starvation besetting one who has been tempted to abandon the source of fifty per cent.  So, if noble imagery were allowable in our time in prose, might alarms and partial regrets be assumed to animate the splendid pumpkin cut loose from the suckers.  Deprived of that prodigious nourishment of the shop in the fashionable seaport of Helmstone, he retired upon his native town, the Cinque Port of Crikswich, where he rented the cheapest residence he could discover for his habitation, the House on the Beach, and lived imposingly, though not in total disaccord with his old mother’s principles.  His income, as he observed to his widowed sister and solitary companion almost daily in their privacy, was respectable.  The descent from an altitude of fifty to five per cent. cannot but be felt.  Nevertheless it was a comforting midnight bolster reflection for a man, turning over to the other side between a dream and a wink, that he was making no bad debts, and one must pay to be addressed as esquire.  Once an esquire, you are off the ground in England and on the ladder.  An esquire can offer his hand in marriage to a lady in her own right; plain esquires have married duchesses; they marry baronets’ daughters every day of the week.

Thoughts of this kind were as the rise and fall of waves in the bosom of the new esquire.  How often in his Helmstone shop had he not heard titled ladies disdaining to talk a whit more prettily than ordinary women; and he had been a match for the subtlety of their pride—­he understood it.  He knew well that at the hint of a proposal from him they would have spoken out in a manner very different to that of ordinary women.  The lightning, only to be warded by an esquire, was in them.  He quitted business at the age of forty, that he might pretend to espousals with a born lady; or at least it was one of the ideas in his mind.

And here, I think, is the moment for the epitaph of anticipation over him, and the exclamation, alas!  I would not be premature, but it is necessary to create some interest in him, and no one but a foreigner could feel it at present for the Englishman who is bursting merely to do like the rest of his countrymen, and rise above them to shake them class by class as the dust from his heels.  Alas! then an—­undertaker’s pathos is better than none at all—­he was not a single-minded aspirant to our social honours.  The old marketing mother; to whom he owed his fortunes, was in his blood to confound his ambition; and so contradictory was the man’s nature, that in revenge for disappointments,