Then there are the "dandy" M.P.'s, who ride hack-horses, associate with fashionable actresses, and hang about the clubs. Then there is the chance or accidental M.P., who has been elected he hardly knows how or when, and wonders to find himself in Parliament. Then there is the desperate, adventuring, ear-wigging M.P., whose hope of political existence, and whose very livelihood, depend upon getting or continuing in place. Then there is the legal M.P., with one eye fixed on the Queen's, the other squinting at the Treasury Bench. Then there is the lounging M.P., who is usually the scion of a noble family, and who comes now and then into the House, to stare vacantly about, and go out again. Then there is the military M.P., who finds the House an agreeable lounge, and does not care to join his regiment on foreign service. Then there is the bustling M.P. of business, the M.P. of business without bustle, and the independent country gentleman M.P., who wants nothing for himself or any body else, and who does not care a turnip-top for the whole lot of them.
The aggregate distinction, as a member of Parliament, is totally sunk in London. It is the man, and not the two letters after his name, that any body whose regard is worth the having in the least regard. There are M.P.s never seen beyond the exclusive set, except on a committee of the House, and then they know and speak to nobody save one of themselves. There are other M.P.s that you will find in no society except Tom Spring's or Owen Swift's, at the Horse-shoe in Litchborne Street.
These observations upon baronets and M.P.s may be extended upwards to the peerage, and downwards to the professional, commercial, and all other the better classes. Every man hangs, like a herring, by his own tail; and every class would be distinct and separate, but that the pretenders to fashion, like some equivocal animals in the chain of animated nature, connect these different classes by copying pertinaciously the manners, and studying to adopt the tastes and habits of the class immediately above them.
Of pretenders to fashion, perhaps the most successful in their imitative art are the
SHEENIES.--By this term, as used by men of undoubted _ton_ with reference to the class we are about to consider, you are to understand runagate Jews rolling in riches, who profess to love roast pork above all things, who always eat their turkey with sausages, and who have _cut_ their religion for the sake of dangling at the heels of fashionable Christians. These people are "swelling" upon the profits of the last generation in St Mary Axe or Petticoat Lane. The founders of their families have been loan-manufacturers, crimps, receivers of stolen goods, wholesale nigger-dealers, clippers and sweaters, rag-merchants, and the like, and conscientious Israelites; but their children, not having fortitude to abide by their condition, nor right principle to adhere to their sect, come to the west end of the town, and, by right of their money, make unremitting assaults upon the loose fish of fashionable society, who laugh at, and heartily despise them, while they are as ashes in the mouths of the respectable members of the persuasion to which they originally belonged.