The Book of Snobs

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I asked this great creature in what other branches of education she
instructed her pupils? 'The modern languages,' says she modestly:
'French, German, Spanish, and Italian, Latin and the rudiments of Greek
if desired. English of course; the practice of Elocution, Geography,
and Astronomy, and the Use of the Globes, Algebra (but only as far as
quadratic equations); for a poor ignorant female, you know, Mr. Snob,
cannot be expected to know everything. Ancient and Modern History
no young woman can be without; and of these I make my beloved pupils
PERFECT MISTRESSES. Botany, Geology, and Mineralogy, I consider as
amusements. And with these I assure you we manage to pass the days at
the Evergreens not unpleasantly.'

Only these, thought I--what an education! But I looked in one of Miss
Ponto's manuscript song-books and found five faults of French in four
words; and in a waggish mood asking Miss Wirt whether Dante Algiery was
so called because he was born at Algiers, received a smiling answer in
the affirmative, which made me rather doubt about the accuracy of Miss
Wirt's knowledge.

When the above little morning occupations are concluded, these
unfortunate young women perform what they call Calisthenic Exercises
in the garden. I saw them to-day, without any crinoline, pulling the
garden-roller.

Dear Mrs. Ponto was in the garden too, and as limp as her daughters; in
a faded bandeau of hair, in a battered bonnet, in a holland pinafore,
in pattens, on a broken chair, snipping leaves off a vine. Mrs. Ponto
measures many yards about in an evening. Ye heavens! what a guy she is
in that skeleton morning-costume!

Besides Stripes, they keep a boy called Thomas or Tummus. Tummus works
in the garden or about the pigsty and stable; Thomas wears a page's
costume of eruptive buttons.

When anybody calls, and Stripes is out of the way, Tummus flings
himself like mad into Thomas's clothes, and comes out metamorphosed
like Harlequin in the pantomime. To-day, as Mrs. P. was cutting the
grapevine, as the young ladies were at the roller, down comes Tummus
like a roaring whirlwind, with 'Missus, Missus, there's company
coomin'!' Away skurry the young ladies from the roller, down comes Mrs.
P. from the old chair, off flies Tummus to change his clothes, and in
an incredibly short space of time Sir John Hawbuck, my Lady Hawbuck,
and Master Hugh Hawbuck are introduced into the garden with brazen
effrontery by Thomas, who says, 'Please Sir Jan and my Lady to walk this
year way: I KNOW Missus is in the rose-garden.'

And there, sure enough, she was!

In a pretty little garden bonnet, with beautiful curling ringlets, with
the smartest of aprons and the freshest of pearl-coloured gloves, this
amazing woman was in the arms of her dearest Lady Hawbuck. 'Dearest Lady
Hawbuck, how good of you! Always among my flowers! can't live away from
them!'

'Sweets to the sweet! hum--a-ha--haw!' says Sir John Hawbuck, who piques
himself on his gallantry, and says nothing without 'a-hum--a-ha--a-haw!'

'Whereth yaw pinnafaw?' cries Master Hugh. 'WE thaw you in it, over the
wall, didn't we, Pa?'

'Hum--a-ha--a-haw!' burst out Sir John, dreadfully alarmed. 'Where's
Ponto? Why wasn't he at Quarter Sessions? How are his birds this year,
Mrs. Ponto--have those Carabas pheasants done any harm to your wheat?
a-hum--a-ha--a-haw!' and all this while he was making the most ferocious
and desperate signals to his youthful heir.

'Well, she WATH in her pinnafaw, wathn't she, Ma?' says Hugh, quite
unabashed; which question Lady Hawbuck turned away with a sudden query
regarding her dear darling daughters, and the ENFANT TERRIBLE was
removed by his father.

'I hope you weren't disturbed by the music?' Ponto says. 'My girls,
you know, practise four hours a day, you know--must do it, you
know--absolutely necessary. As for me, you know I'm an early man, and in
my farm every morning at five--no, no laziness for ME.'

The facts are these. Ponto goes to sleep directly after dinner on
entering the drawing-room, and wakes up when the ladies leave off
practice at ten. From seven till ten, from ten till five, is a very fair
allowance of slumber for a man who says he's NOT a lazy man. It is my
private opinion that when Ponto retires to what is called his 'Study,'
he sleeps too. He locks himself up there daily two hours with the
newspaper.

I saw the HAWBUCK scene out of the Study, which commands the garden.
It's a curious object, that Study. Ponto's library mostly consists of
boots. He and Stripes have important interviews here of mornings,
when the potatoes are discussed, or the fate of the calf ordained, or
sentence passed on the pig, &c.. All the Major's bills are docketed on
the Study table and displayed like a lawyer's briefs. Here, too, lie
displayed his hooks, knives, and other gardening irons, his whistles,
and strings of spare buttons. He has a drawer of endless brown paper for
parcels, and another containing a prodigious and never-failing supply of
string. What a man can want with so many gig-whips I can never conceive.
These, and fishing-rods, and landing-nets, and spurs, and boot-trees,
and balls for horses, and surgical implements for the same, and
favourite pots of shiny blacking, with which he paints his own shoes
in the most elegant manner, and buckskin gloves stretched out on their
trees, and his gorget, sash, and sabre of the Horse Marines, with his
boot-hooks underneath in atrophy; and the family medicine-chest, and
in a corner the very rod with which he used to whip his son, Wellesley
Ponto, when a boy (Wellesley never entered the 'Study' but for that
awful purpose)--all these, with 'Mogg's Road Book,' the GARDENERS'
CHRONICLE, and a backgammon-board, form the Major's library. Under the
trophy there's a picture of Mrs. Ponto, in a light blue dress and train,
and no waist, when she was first married; a fox's brush lies over the
frame, and serves to keep the dust off that work of art.

'My library's small, says Ponto, with the most amazing impudence, 'but
well selected, my boy--well selected. I have been reading the "History
of England" all the morning.'



CHAPTER XXVII--A VISIT TO SOME COUNTRY SNOBS

We had the fish, which, as the kind reader may remember, I had brought
down in a delicate attention to Mrs. Ponto, to variegate the repast of
next day; and cod and oyster-sauce, twice laid, salt cod and scolloped
oysters, formed parts of the bill of fare until I began to fancy that
the Ponto family, like our late revered monarch George II., had a fancy
for stale fish. And about this time, the pig being consumed, we began
upon a sheep.

But how shall I forget the solemn splendour of a second course, which
was served up in great state by Stripes in a silver dish and cove; a
napkin round his dirty thumbs; and consisted of a landrail, not much
bigger than a corpulent sparrow.

'My love, will you take any game?' says Ponto, with prodigious gravity;
and stuck his fork into that little mouthful of an island in the
silver sea. Stripes, too, at intervals, dribbled out the Marsala with
a solemnity which would have done honour to a Duke's butler. The
Bamnecide's dinner to Shacabac was only one degree removed from these
solemn banquets.

As there were plenty of pretty country places close by; a comfortable
country town, with good houses of gentlefolks; a beautiful old
parsonage, close to the church whither we went (and where the Carabas
family have their ancestral carved and monumented Gothic pew), and every
appearance of good society in the neighbourhood, I rather wondered we
were not enlivened by the appearance of some of the neighbours at the
Evergreens, and asked about them.

'We can't in our position of life--we can't well associate with
the attorney's family, as I leave you to suppose,' says Mrs. Ponto,
confidentially. 'Of course not,' I answered, though I didn't know why.
'And the Doctor?' said I.

'A most excellent worthy creature,' says Mrs. P. saved Maria's
life--really a learned man; but what can one do in one's position? One
may ask one's medical man to one's table certainly: but his family, my
dear Mr. Snob!'

'Half-a-dozen little gallipots,' interposed Miss Wirt, the governess:
'he, he, he!' and the young ladies laughed in chorus.

'We only live with the county families,' Miss Wirt (1) continued,
tossing up her head. 'The Duke is abroad: we are at feud with the
Carabases; the Ringwoods don't come down till Christmas: in fact,
nobody's here till the hunting season--positively nobody.'

'Whose is the large red house just outside of the town?'

'What! the CHATEAU-CALICOT? he, he, he! That purse-proud ex-linendraper,
Mr. Yardley, with the yellow liveries, and the wife in red velvet? How
CAN you, my dear Mr. Snob, be so satirical? The impertinence of those
people is really something quite overwhelming.'

'Well, then, there is the parson, Doctor Chrysostom. He's a gentleman,
at any rate.' At this Mrs. Ponto looked at Miss Wirt. After their eyes
had met and they had wagged their heads at each other. They looked up
to the ceiling. So did the young ladies. They thrilled. It was evident I
had said something terrible. Another black sheep in the Church? thought
I with a little sorrow; for I don't care to own that I have a respect
for the cloth. 'I--hope there's nothing wrong?

'Wrong?' says Mrs. P., clasping her hands with a tragic air.

'Oh!' says Miss Wirt, and the two girls, gasping in chorus.

'Well,' says I, 'I'm very sorry for it. I never saw a nicer-looking old
gentleman, or a better school, or heard a better sermon.'

'He used to preach those sermons in a surplice,' hissed out Mrs. Ponto.
'He's a Puseyite, Mr. Snob.'

'Heavenly powers!' says I, admiring the pure ardour of these female
theologians; and Stripes came in with the tea. It's so weak that no
wonder Ponto's sleep isn't disturbed by it.

Of mornings we used to go out shooting. We had Ponto's own fields to
sport over (where we got the landrail), and the non-preserved part of
the Hawbuck property: and one evening in a stubble of Ponto's skirting
the Carabas woods, we got among some pheasants, and had some real sport.
I shot a hen, I know, greatly to my delight. 'Bag it,' says Ponto, in
rather a hurried manner: 'here's somebody coming.' So I pocketed the
bird.

'You infernal poaching thieves!' roars out a man from the hedge in the
garb of a gamekeeper. 'I wish I could catch you on this side of the
hedge. I'd put a brace of barrels into you, that I would.'

'Curse that Snapper,' says Ponto, moving off; 'he's always watching me
like a spy.'

'Carry off the birds, you sneaks, and sell 'em in London,' roars the
individual, who it appears was a keeper of Lord Carabas. 'You'll get six
shillings a brace for 'em.'

'YOU know the price of 'em well enough, and so does your master too, you
scoundrel,' says Ponto, still retreating.

'We kill 'em on our ground,' cries Mr. Snapper. 'WE don't set traps for
other people's birds. We're no decoy ducks. We're no sneaking poachers.
We don't shoot 'ens, like that 'ere Cockney, who's got the tail of one
a-sticking out of his pocket. Only just come across the hedge, that's
all.'

'I tell you what,' says Stripes, who was out with us as keeper this
day, (in fact he's keeper, coachman, gardener, valet, and bailiff, with
Tummus under him,) 'if YOU'LL come across, John Snapper, and take your
coat off, I'll give you such a whopping as you've never had since the
last time I did it at Guttlebury Fair.'

'Whop one of your own weight,' Mr. Snapper said, whistling his dogs
and disappearing into the wood. And so we came out of this controversy
rather victoriously; but I began to alter my preconceived ideas of rural
felicity.

Notes.

(1) I have since heard that this aristocratic lady's father was a
livery-button maker in St. Martin's Lane: where he met with misfortunes,
and his daughter acquired her taste for heraldry. But it may be told
to her credit, that out of her earnings she has kept the bed-ridden old
bankrupt in great comfort and secrecy at Pentonville; and furnished her
brother's outfit for the Cadetship which her patron, Lord Swigglebiggle,
gave her when he was at the Board of Control. I have this information
from a friend. To hear Miss Wirt herself, you would fancy that her Papa
was a Rothschild, and that the markets of Europe were convulsed when he
went into the GAZETTE.



CHAPTER XXVIII--ON SOME COUNTRY SNOBS

'Be hanged to your aristocrats!' Ponto said, in some conversation we had
regarding the family at Carabas, between whom and the Evergreens there
was a feud. 'When I first came into the county--it was the year before
Sir John Buff contested in the Blue interest--the Marquis, then Lord St.
Michaels, who, of course, was Orange to the core, paid me and Mrs. Ponto
such attentions, that I fairly confess I was taken in by the old humbug,
and thought that I'd met with a rare neighbour. 'Gad, Sir, we used to
get pines from Carabas, and pheasants from Carabas, and it was--"Ponto,
when will you come over and shoot?"--and--"Ponto, our pheasants want
thinning,"--and my Lady would insist upon her dear Mrs. Ponto coming
over to Carabas to sleep, and put me I don't know to what expense for
turbans and velvet gowns for my wife's toilette. Well, Sir, the election
takes place, and though I was always a Liberal, personal friendship of
course induces me to plump for St. Michaels, who comes in at the head of
the poll. Next year, Mrs. P. insists upon going to town--with lodgings
in Clarges Street at ten pounds a week, with a hired brougham, and new
dresses for herself and the girls, and the deuce and all to pay. Our
first cards were to Carabas House; my Lady's are returned by a great big
flunkey; and I leave you to fancy my poor Betsy's discomfiture as the
lodging-house maid took in the cards, and Lady St. Michaels drives away,
though she actually saw us at the drawing-room window. Would you believe
it, Sir, that though we called four times afterwards, those infernal
aristocrats never returned our visit; that though Lady St. Michaels gave
nine dinner-parties and four DEJEUNERS that season, she never asked us
to one; and that she cut us dead at the Opera, though Betsy was nodding
to her the whole night? We wrote to her for tickets for Almack's; she
writes to say that all hers were promised; and said, in the presence of
Wiggins, her lady's-maid, who told it to Diggs, my wife's woman, that
she couldn't conceive how people in our station of life could so far
forget themselves as to wish to appear in any such place! Go to
Castle Carabas! I'd sooner die than set my foot in the house of that
impertinent, insolvent, insolent jackanapes--and I hold him in scorn!'
After this, Ponto gave me some private information regarding Lord
Carabas's pecuniary affairs; how he owed money all over the county; how
Jukes the carpenter was utterly ruined and couldn't get a shilling of
his bill; how Biggs the butcher hanged himself for the same reason; how
the six big footmen never received a guinea of wages, and Snaffle, the
state coachman, actually took off his blown-glass wig of ceremony and
flung it at Lady Carabas's feet on the terrace before the Castle; all
which stories, as they are private, I do not think proper to divulge.
But these details did not stifle my desire to see the famous mansion
of Castle Carabas, nay, possibly excited my interest to know more about
that lordly house and its owners.

At the entrance of the park, there are a pair of great gaunt mildewed
lodges--mouldy Doric temples with black chimney-pots, in the finest
classic taste, and the gates of course are surmounted by the CHATS
BOTTES, the well-known supporters of the Carabas family. 'Give the
lodge-keeper a shilling,' says Ponto, (who drove me near to it in his
four-wheeled cruelty-chaise). 'I warrant it's the first piece of ready
money he has received for some time. I don't know whether there was any
foundation for this sneer, but the gratuity was received with a curtsey,
and the gate opened for me to enter. 'Poor old porteress!' says I,
inwardly. 'You little know that it is the Historian of Snobs whom you
let in!' The gates were passed. A damp green stretch of park spread
right and left immeasurably, confined by a chilly grey wall, and a damp
long straight road between two huge rows of moist, dismal lime-trees,
leads up to the Castle. In the midst of the park is a great black tank
or lake, bristling over with rushes, and here and there covered over
with patches of pea-soup. A shabby temple rises on an island in this
delectable lake, which is approached by a rotten barge that lies at
roost in a dilapidated boat house. Clumps of elms and oaks dot over the
huge green flat. Every one of them would have been down long since, but
that the Marquis is not allowed to cut the timber.

Up that long avenue the Snobographer walked in solitude. At the
seventy-ninth tree on the left-hand side, the insolvent butcher hanged
himself. I scarcely wondered at the dismal deed, so woful and sad were
the impressions connected with the place. So, for a mile and a half I
walked--alone and thinking of death.

I forgot to say the house is in full view all the way--except when
intercepted by the trees on the miserable island in the lake--an
enormous red-brick mansion, square, vast, and dingy. It is flanked by
four stone towers with weathercocks. In the midst of the grand facade is
a huge Ionic portico, approached by a vast, lonely, ghastly staircase.
Rows of black windows, framed in stone, stretch on either side, right
and left--three storeys and eighteen windows of a row. You may see
a picture of the palace and staircase, in the 'Views of England and
Wales,' with four carved and gilt carriages waiting at the gravel walk,
and several parties of ladies and gentlemen in wigs and hoops, dotting
the fatiguing lines of stairs.

But these stairs are made in great houses for people NOT to ascend. The
first Lady Carabas (they are but eighty years in the peerage), if she
got out of her gilt coach in a shower, would be wet to the skin before
she got half-way to the carved Ionic portico, where four dreary statues
of Peace, Plenty, Piety and Patriotism, are the only sentinels. You
enter these palaces by back-doors. 'That was the way the Carabases got
their peerage,' the misanthropic Ponto said after dinner.

Well--I rang the bell at a little low side-door; it clanged and jingled
and echoed for a long, long while, till at length a face, as of a
housekeeper, peered through the door, and, as she saw my hand in my
waistcoat pocket, opened it. Unhappy, lonely housekeeper, I thought. Is
Miss Crusoe in her island more solitary? The door clapped to, and I was
in Castle Carabas.

'The side entrance and All,' says the housekeeper. 'The halligator
hover the mantelpiece was brought home by Hadmiral St. Michaels, when
a Capting with Lord Hanson. The harms on the cheers is the harms of the
Carabas family.' The hall was rather comfortable. We went clapping up a
clean stone backstair, and then into a back passage cheerfully decorated
with ragged light-green Kidderminster, and issued upon

'THE GREAT ALL.

'The great all is seventy-two feet in lenth, fifty-six in breath, and
thirty-eight feet 'igh. The carvings of the chimlies, representing the
birth of Venus, and Ercules, and Eyelash, is by Van Chislum, the most
famous sculpture of his hage and country. The ceiling, by Calimanco,
represents Painting, Harchitecture and Music (the naked female figure
with the barrel horgan) introducing George, fust Lord Carabas, to the
Temple of the Muses. The winder ornaments is by Vanderputty. The floor
is Patagonian marble; and the chandelier in the centre was presented to
Lionel, second Marquis, by Lewy the Sixteenth, whose 'ead was cut hoff
in the French Revelation. We now henter

THE SOUTH GALLERY.

'One 'undred and forty-eight in lenth by thirty-two in breath; it is
profusely hornaminted by the choicest works of Hart. Sir Andrew Katz,
founder of the Carabas family and banker of the Prince of Horange,
Kneller. Her present Ladyship, by Lawrence. Lord St. Michaels, by the
same--he is represented sittin' on a rock in velvit pantaloons. Moses in
the bullrushes--the bull very fine, by Paul Potter. The toilet of Venus,
Fantaski. Flemish Bores drinking, Van Ginnums. Jupiter and Europia, de
Horn. The Grandjunction Canal, Venis, by Candleetty; and Italian Bandix,
by Slavata Rosa.'--And so this worthy woman went on, from one room into
another, from the blue room to the green, and the green to the grand
saloon, and the grand saloon to the tapestry closet, cackling her list
of pictures and wonders: and furtively turning up a corner of brown
holland to show the colour of the old, faded, seedy, mouldy, dismal
hangings.

At last we came to her Ladyship's bed-room. In the centre of this dreary
apartment there is a bed about the size of one of those whizgig temples
in which the Genius appears in a pantomime. The huge gilt edifice is
approached by steps, and so tall, that it might be let off in floors,
for sleeping-rooms for all the Carabas family. An awful bed! A murder
might be done at one end of that bed, and people sleeping at the other
end be ignorant of it. Gracious powers! fancy little Lord Carabas in a
nightcap ascending those steps after putting out the candle!

The sight of that seedy and solitary splendour was too much for me.
I should go mad were I that lonely housekeeper--in those enormous
galleries--in that lonely library, filled up with ghastly folios that
nobody dares read, with an inkstand on the centre table like the coffin
of a baby, and sad portraits staring at you from the bleak walls with
their solemn Mouldy eyes. No wonder that Carabas does not come down here
often.

It would require two thousand footmen to make the place cheerful. No
wonder the coachman resigned his wig, that the masters are insolvent,
and the servants perish in this huge dreary out-at-elbow place.

A single family has no more right to build itself a temple of that sort
than to erect a Tower of Babel. Such a habitation is not decent for a
mere mortal man. But, after all, I suppose poor Carabas had no choice.
Fate put him there as it sent Napoleon to St. Helena. Suppose it had
been decreed by Nature that you and I should be Marquises? We wouldn't
refuse, I suppose, but take Castle Carabas and all, with debts, duns,
and mean makeshifts, and shabby pride, and swindling magnificence.

Next season, when I read of Lady Carabas's splendid entertainments in
the MORNING POST, and see the poor old insolvent cantering through the
Park--I shall have a much tenderer interest in these great people than
I have had heretofore. Poor old shabby Snob! Ride on and fancy the world
is still on its knees before the house of Carabas! Give yourself airs,
poor old bankrupt Magnifico, who are under money-obligations to your
flunkeys; and must stoop so as to swindle poor tradesmen! And for us, O
my brother Snobs, oughtn't we to feel happy if our walk through life is
more even, and that we are out of the reach of that surprising arrogance
and that astounding meanness to which this wretched old victim is
obliged to mount and descend.



CHAPTER XXIX--A VISIT TO SOME COUNTRY SNOBS

Notable as my reception had been (under that unfortunate mistake of Mrs.
Ponto that I was related to Lord Snobbington, which I was not permitted
to correct), it was nothing compared to the bowing and kotooing, the
raptures and flurry which preceded and welcomed the visit of a real live
lord and lord's son, a brother officer of Cornet Wellesley Ponto, in
the 120th Hussars, who came over with the young Cornet from Guttlebury,
where their distinguished regiment was quartered. This was my
Lord Gules, Lord Saltire's grandson and heir: a very young, short,
sandy-haired and tobacco-smoking nobleman, who cannot have left the
nursery very long, and who, though he accepted the honest Major's
invitation to the Evergreens in a letter written in a school-boy
handwriting, with a number of faults of spelling, may yet be a very fine
classical scholar for what I know: having had his education at Eton,
where he and young Ponto were inseparable.

At any rate, if he can't write, he has mastered a number of other
accomplishments wonderful for one of his age and size. He is one of the
best shots and riders in England. He rode his horse Abracadabra, and won
the famous Guttlebury steeple-chase. He has horses entered at half the
races in the country (under other people's names; for the old lord is a
strict hand, and will not hear of betting or gambling). He has lost and
won such sums of money as my Lord George himself might be proud of.
He knows all the stables, and all the jockeys, and has all the
'information,' and is a match for the best Leg at Newmarket. Nobody was
ever known to be 'too much' for him at play or in the stable.

Although his grandfather makes him a moderate allowance, by the aid of
POST-OBITS and convenient friends he can live in a splendour becoming
his rank. He has not distinguished himself in the knocking down of
policemen much; he is not big enough for that. But, as a light-weight,
his skill is of the very highest order. At billiards he is said to
be first-rate. He drinks and smokes as much as any two of the biggest
officers in his regiment. With such high talents, who can say how far
he may not go? He may take to politics as a DELASSEMENT, and be Prime
Minister after Lord George Bentinck.