And the English Radical, looking at the merchant prince over the high wall of unequal income, saw, not a commercial suburban sultan but a snob. Immediately a snob-scare started. Everyone was recognised as a snob. Even those born to the Patrician purple were degraded in the public mind to the level of inflated tradesmen who, in some colossal way, had forgotten not only their place but their price. And, naturally enough, the effect on the snob-hunters was deplorable. A new race of snobs, with noses trained to catch the scent of a distant title or the thin whiff of a putative annuity, grew up and overran society. And to these came Thackeray, like Mahomet to the waiting Faithful. Considering the essentially mean nature of the prevailing public sentiment, the public did remarkably well to get Thackeray to be the author who was to make it articulate. He was, at least, a full-sized man. And he could spot snobs by looking at them from above—which is really a kind of heavenly rebuke; and not by spying on them from below—which is often a pretty open kind of earthly envy.
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