Newcome, whose son Clive, Thackeray wishes us to admire, though I confess I find him insufferable. Then his first wife dies and Thomas flies at higher game. He woos and wins the great heiress, pietist, and philanthropist, Sophia Alethea Hobson, to the amazement of the serious Clapham circle in which she moves. Their twin sons are Sir Brian, who marries Lady Ann Barnes, daughter of the Earl of Kew, whose eldest son is Lord Walham--all neighbouring suburbs of London give the name to this aristocratic family,--and Hobson, a thorough man of business, who marries a lawyer’s daughter, and affects the farmer, whilst his wife professes to admire talent. Hobson is shrewd, Brian pompous, and as the former says of himself, you must get up very early in the morning to take him in. If in Foker we have the attractive side, in Sir Brian Newcome’s eldest son Barnes we have the other aspect of the blending of birth and business. Had Harry Foker sprung from two noble grandfathers, he might have been just as simple-hearted and good-natured as he now appears, like Lord Southdown in “Vanity Fair,” or Ethel Newcome’s lover, Lord Kew; but he would not have been quite so shrewd--for it is no impeachment of a man’s natural good sense that he should have been taken in by the purely imaginary virtues of a Blanche Amory. But in Barnes Newcome we see the mixture of the hardness of a well-bred man of the world and the business ability inherited from a commercial ancestry. I cannot resist quoting at some length the introduction of Barnes to his uncle Col. Newcome at Mrs. Hobson Newcome’s evening party. The description of it is sketched for the Colonel’s benefit, by Frank Honeyman, the popular preacher. “The Jew with a beard, as you call him, is Herr Von Lungen the eminent haut-boy player.... At the piano, accompanied by Mademoiselle Lebrun, is Signor Mezzocaldo the great barytone from Rome. Professor Quartz and Baron Hammerstein, celebrated geologists from Germany, are talking with their illustrious _confrère_ Sir Robert Craxton, in the door. Do you see that stout gentleman with snuff on his shirt? The eloquent Dr. McGuffog of Edinburgh talking to Dr. Ettore, who lately escaped the Inquisition at Rome in the disguise of a washerwoman, after undergoing the question several times, the rack and the thumbscrew.... That splendid man in the red fez is Kurbash Pasha--another renegade, I deeply lament to say,--a hair-dresser from Marseilles, by name Monsieur Ferchaud--”