He is now a disappointed man whom his friends, if he had any, would
pity. He is getting on in life; the affectations he so laboriously
cultivated no longer amuse. The witlings of his Clubs remark openly
upon his ridiculous desire to pose as an earth-shaking personage, and
when he goes home he has to listen to a series of bitter home-truths
from the acrid ELVIRA. Would it not, I ask, have been better for
Sir GERVASE BLENKINSOP, K.C.M.G., to have continued his ancient and
aimless existence, than to have had a fallacious greatness dangled
before his eyes to the end of his disappointed, but aspiring life?
[Illustration]
One more instance, and I have done. Do you remember TOMMY TIPSTAFF at
Trinity? I do. He was, of course, a foolish youth, but he might have
had a pleasant life in the fat living for which his family intended
him. In his second year at the University, he met Sir JAMES SPOOF,
an undergraduate Baronet, of great wealth, and dissolute habits. Poor
TOMMY was dazzled by his new friend's specious glare and glitter, and
his slapdash manner of scattering his money.
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