"_There ought to be_, [with emphasis.] You must know, Mr ----, Dr Tryiton has forwarded to a high quarter a beautifully bound copy of his work on ulcerated sore throat; he says there is a great analogy between ulcers of the throat and den--den--den--something, I don't know what--teething, in short. If nothing comes of it, Dr Tryiton, thank Heaven, can do without it; but you know, Mr ----, it may, on a future occasion, be _useful to our family_." If there is, in the great world of London, one thing more spirit-sinking than another, it is to see men condemned, by the necessities of an overcrowded profession, to sink to the meannesses of pretension for a desperate accident by which they may insure success. When one has had an opportunity of being behind the scenes, and knowing what petty shifts, what poor expedients of living, what anxiety of mind, are at the bottom of all this empty show, one will not longer marvel that many born for better things should sink under the difficulties of their position, or that the newspapers so continually set forth the miserably unprovided for condition in which they so often are compelled to leave their families. To dissipate the melancholy that always oppresses us when constrained to behold the ridiculous antics of the gentility-mongers, which we chronicle only to endeavour at a reformation--let us contrast the hospitality of those who, with wiser ambition, keep themselves, as the saying is, "_to themselves_;" and, as a bright example, let us recollect our old friend Joe Stimpson. Joe Stimpson is a tanner and leather-seller in Bermondsey, the architect of his own fortune, which he has raised to the respectable elevation of somewhere about a quarter of a million sterling. He is now in his seventy-second year, has a handsome house, without and pretension, overlooking his tanyard. He has a joke upon prospects, calling you to look from the drawing-room window at his tanpits, asking you if you ever saw any thing like that at the west end of the town; replying in the negative, Joe, chuckling, observes that it is the finest prospect _he_ ever saw in his life, and although he has been admiring it for half a century, he has not done admiring it yet. Joe's capacity for the humorous may be judged of by this specimen; but in attention to business few can surpass him, while his hospitality can command a wit whenever he chooses to angle for one with a good dinner. He has a wife, a venerable old smiling lady in black silk, neat cap, and polished shoes; three daughters, unmarried; and a couple of sons, brought up, after the London fashion, to inherit their father's business, or, we might rather say, _estate_.