Page:Fitzgerald - Pickwickian manners and customs (1897).djvu/21

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PICKWICKIAN MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.
15

day, and also by a more worthy specimen in the person of the clergyman at Dingley Dell. There are the mail-coach drivers, with the "ostlers, boots, countrymen, gamekeepers, peasants, and others," as they have it in the play-bills. Truly admirable, and excelling the rest, are "Boz's" sketches—actually "living pictures"—of the fashionable footmen at Bath, beside which the strokes in that diverting piece "High Life below Stairs" seem almost flat. The simperings of these gentry, their airs and conceit, we may be sure, obtain now. Once coming out of a Theatre, at some fashionable performance, through a long lane of tall menials, one fussy aristocrat pushed one of them out of his way. The menial contemptuously pushed him back. The other in a rage said, "How dare you? Don't you know, I'm the Earl of ——" "Well," said the other coldly, "If you be a Hearl, can't you be'ave as sich?"

After the wedding at Manor Farm we find