The works of William Makepeace Thackeray Vol. 14 - new book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. ON SOME RESPECTABLE SNOBS. AVING received a great deal of obloquy for dragging monarchs, princes, and the respected nobility into the Snob category, I trust to please everybody in the present chapter, by stating my firm opinion that it is among the respectable classes of this vast and happy empire that the greatest profusion of Snobs is to be found. I pace down my beloved Baker Street (I am engaged on a life of Baker, founder of this celebrated street), I walk in Harley Street (where every other house has a hatchment), Wimpole Street, that is as cheerful as the Catacombs ? a dingy Mausoleum of the genteel: ? I rove round Regent's Park, where the plaster is patching off the house walls; where Methodist preachers are holding forth to three little children in the green enclosures, and puffy valetudinarians are cantering in the solitary mud: ? I thread the doubtful zig-zags of Mayfair, where Mrs. Kitty Lorimer's brougham may be seen drawn up next door to old Lady Lollipop's belozenged family coach; ? I roam through Belgravia, that pale and polite district, where all the inhabitants look prim and correct, and the mansions are painted a faint whity- broTrn; I lose myself in the new squares and terraces of the brilliant brand-new Bayswater-and-Tyburn- Junction line; and in one and all of these districts the same truth comes across me. I stop before any house at hazard, and say, "O house, you are inhabited?0 knocker, you are knocked at?O undressed flunkey, sunning your lazy calves as you lean against the iron railings, you are paid?by Snobs." It is a tremendous thought that; and it is almost sufficient to drive a benevolent mind to madness to think that perhaps there is not one in ten of those houses where the " Peerage " does not lie on the drawing-room table....