For instance, suppose you, in the
middle rank of life, accustomed to Mutton, roast on Tuesday, cold
on Wednesday, hashed on Thursday, &c., with small means and a small
establishment, choose to waste the former and set the latter topsy-turvy
by giving entertainments unnaturally costly--you come into the
Dinner-giving Snob class at once. Suppose you get in cheap-made
dishes from the pastrycook's, and hire a couple of greengrocers, or
carpet-beaters, to figure as footmen, dismissing honest Molly, who waits
on common days, and bedizening your table (ordinarily ornamented with
willow-pattern crockery) with twopenny-halfpenny Birmingham plate.
Suppose you pretend to be richer and grander than you ought to be--you
are a Dinner-giving Snob. And oh, I tremble to think how many and many a
one will read this!
A man who entertains in this way--and, alas, how few do not!--is like
a fellow who would borrow his neighbour's coat to make a show in, or a
lady who flaunts in the diamonds from next door--a humbug, in a word,
and amongst the Snobs he must be set down.
A man who goes out of his natural sphere of society to ask Lords,
Generals, Aldermen, and other persons of fashion, but is niggardly of
his hospitality towards his own equals, is a Dinner-giving Snob. My
dear friend, Jack Tufthunt, for example, knows ONE Lord whom he met at
a watering-place: old Lord Mumble, who is as toothless as a
three-months-old baby, and as mum as an undertaker, and as dull
as--well, we will not particularise.
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