The "Model Fast Lady" liked champagne, but the charge of indulgence in the pleasures of the table is never brought against women of fashion. Their extravagance in dress is often rebuked; but lovely woman, if left to herself, in the 'forties and 'fifties, was probably content to subsist (as according to R. L. Stevenson she subsisted forty or fifty years later) mainly on tea and cake. Women were not exempt from the accusation of snobbery: sarcastic comment is prompted by the letter of a correspondent to the _Morning Post_, who wrote to describe how, as the result of a railway accident, she, "a young lady of some birth, was placed in a cornfield and had to wait six hours." [Sidenote: _Verrey and Gunter_] [Illustration: Manners and Cvstoms of ye Englyshe A FASHIONABLE CLUB--FOUR O'CLOCK P.M.] The brunt, however, of the social satire was borne by the men. Gluttony was ever a male vice, and _Punch_ is constantly running a tilt against civic gourmands and turtle-guzzling aldermen. But his censure was not confined to the gross orgies of the City Fathers at a time when cholera and typhus were rampant. "Everybody lives as if he had three or four thousand a year," is his dictum, which he follows up by pleading for more simple and frequent dinners, the entertainment of poor friends and relations--more hospitality and less show. The "nobility and gentry" did not, however, court publicity in their entertainments as in a later age.[19] They dined sumptuously in their own houses; there were few expensive restaurants in those days or for many years to come. The nearest approach was Verrey's Café, which was then a fashionable resort, and the immortal Gunter, who "to parties gave up what was meant for mankind." "Society" was small, unmixed, and exclusive. Neither love nor money could secure the "Spangle-Lacquers" (under which title _Punch_ satirizes the pretensions of the New Rich), the _entrée_ to Almack's. For club life a mine of useful information is to be found in Thackeray's "Letters to a Young Man about Town" and in the social cartoons of Richard Doyle. The account of a club cardroom and the absorption and obsession of the players needs little revision to fit the manners of to-day, and there is much excellent advice to young men to avoid roystering and drinking with "Old Silenus," the midnight monarch of the smoking-room at the Polyanthus. From Thackeray's contributions we have borrowed sparingly, but cannot refrain from quoting the passage in which he pays noble homage to the genius of Dickens:--