The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 229: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

202 REYNOLDS’ WORKS of a woodcut upon the cover. If you went for a walk in the fields in the environs of London, your eye would catch the name, calling, and address of Mr. Samuel Emanuel upon every fence and on every dead wall. If you looked in the advertising columns of the newspapers, your eye would suddenly rest on a string of ill-measured lines, by courtesy called ‘‘ poetry,’’ and if you had the curiosity or patience to read the wretched doggerel, you would thence evolve a series of the most extravagant puffs of Mr. Samuel Emanuel’s establishment. There could be no doubt in your mind that while Mr. Samuel Emanuel considered the sovereign to be the first personage in the realm, he entertained the pleasing conviction that he himself was the second. Talk of your first-rate authors, your eminent artists, or your great sculp- tors, talk of your renowned warriors by sea or by land, — what was any one of these in comparison with the far-famed Mr. Samuel Emanuel? And yet, if you walked into his establishment and beheld this great personage, you would find him to be as unpre- possessing a fellow as you could possibly meet in a day’s walk. Scarcely of the middle height, ill made and ungainly, he sought to set himself off by all the accessories of his own tailoring craft. No trouser pattern in his own window would be more outrageous than the one selected for his pantaloons. He would wear a dress coat, with rich velvet collar and lapels, as early as eight o’clock in the morning, and his waistcoat would be of the gaudiest silk pattern. As for his neckerchief, it would be sure to correspond in its flaunting vulgarity with the rest of his attire, and would be fastened in front with some inconceivably outrageous breastpin, — perhaps an enormous carbuncle clutched in a golden fist. Festooning over his gaudy waistcoat there would be three or four watch-chains of different fashions and degrees of massiveness, and his dirty, stumpy, ill-shaped fingers, with very horrible nails, would be decorated with enough rings to fill a small tray, such as those whose contents purchasers are invited to inspect in jewelers’ shops. As for his counte- nance, it had all the characteristics of his race, but with an expression of mingled hardness and meanness, of paltry cunning and avaricious greed, together witha faculty for the sudden assumption of a vulgar insolence, that might readily be supposed to characterize such an individual. CORNICLIOOKS (E(0)