Page:Early Essays by George Eliot (1919).djvu/52

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infantine dreamer, etc. No matter how stale the epithets may be, paucity of invention is no disadvantage here, since the oftener a nickname is repeated the better it will tell. Do we not know that two-thirds of mankind are influenced, not by facts or principles, but by associations about as appropriate as the connection between a bright summer's day and roast pig in the mind of the ingenious Mrs. Nickleby?

4. Any who have been elevated in society, whether by a migration from the thoroughfare of Gudgeon Street to the more genteel locality of the Olympian Villas, or by a still more brilliant transit, must not neglect the precious opportunity of snubbing their former familiars. We refer them to Shakespeare's Falconbridge:


"Good den, Sir Richard,—God a' mercy, fellow:
And if his name be George, I'll call him Peter:
For new-made honour doth forget men's names,
Tis too respective and too sociable,
For your conversion."


5. Ladies who go to parties with the hope of being the belles of the evening, must on no account venture to snub any whose pretensions threaten to eclipse their own. This would look like envy. They must rather behave to such with a sweet, condescending blandness, as if unconscious of the danger

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