My aunt then told her husband to take me upstairs; it was nearly five, and dinner would soon be ready. So I followed my uncle to a bed-room, and there, as I brushed my hair and curled my mustache, I wondered what sort of an impression I had made on my relations. I thought of my father’s advice, and wished I knew how to be as magnificent as he. He had often told me that his brothers had a very high respect for him, and considered him the prop and decoration of the family name. I thought this quite likely. People in business _do_ respect professional relations. Profit and purple are a fine combination; and if Mr. Scrip knows that her ladyship would call upon Mrs. Scrip, were she to hear that the Dean was Mrs. Scrip’s brother, why shouldn’t Scrip brag of the parson, and combine social dignity with his remunerative pursuits in Throgmorton Street? I lamented my inability to imitate my father’s lordliness, for then I might have profited by my relations’ pride in him, and provoked deference, and even awe, by repeating in myself those swelling qualities and overtopping characteristics which rendered my father among his acquaintance an object of admiration and reverence. It is an old saying, that the world will always take you at your own price. Cast your eyes around you, Eugenio, and mark the numbers who are buying paste for precious stones, and, albeit, by no means destitute of the critical faculty, ostentatiously parading the worthless make-believe in the sincere conviction that they are gems of the purest ray serene. Any muff can make himself a considerable man, if he will but shout long and loud enough to the populace to step up! step up! and admire! “Behold me, gentlemen!” says the poet through himself or through his friends. “I am not so great a man as Shakespeare, and I have not Dante’s austere and morbid imagination. But it is universally acknowledged that I combine the sweetness of Keats and the wisdom of Wordsworth with the power of Byron and the ghastliness of Coleridge; and give me leave to say that the man who can rival these acknowledged geniuses _must_ be great?” “Hooroor!” yell the populace. They believe him; they buy his quarto of nonsense; and lo! another muff is canonised. So I maintain that my father was right when he exhorted me to treat life as a court-dress affair. The world is so full of hero-worshippers, that no man can think himself too important. CHAPTER III. _Hardcastle._ “I believe, sir, you must be sensible, sir, that no man alive ought to be more welcome than your father’s son, sir. I hope you think so?” _Marlow._ “I do, from my soul, sir. I don’t want much entreaty, I generally make my father’s son welcome wherever he goes.”--_She Stoops to Conquer._