Leaving the novels, we come to the Book of Snobs, where the storming of society is seen at a later stage. In Chapter VII on “some respectable snobs” we have the rise of the noble family of de Mogyns. The first of this ancient race who appeared above the horizon in these degenerate days was a Mr. Muggins, banker, army contractor, smuggler, and general jobber, lent money to a R-y-l P-rs-n-ge, and by way of payment was made a baronet. His son paid undue attention to Miss Flack at a county ball. Captain Flack, her father, offered the alternative of a duel or marriage, in accordance with the custom of the Irish nation to which he belonged and of the age; young Alured Smith Muggins preferred to marry the lady and on the death of his father became a baronet. The editor of Fluke’s Peerage found him a pedigree. The family was really founded by the patriarch Shem, whose grandson began to draw up its pedigree on a papyrus scroll now in the possession of the family. In the days of Boadicea, Hogyn Mogyn of the hundred beeves aspired to marry that warlike princess. Whether he wooed and also won is not stated, but he married someone and became the ancestor of Mogyn of the golden harp, the black fiend son of Mogyn, ancestor of the princes of Pontydwdlm. These succumbed to the English Kings; but their representative David Gam de Mogins fought bravely at Agincourt and from him Sir Thomas Muggins was descended. This sounds a mere satire. I turn to Burke’s Peerage 1895. I find that the son of a famous contractor, whose father was celebrated for having begun as a navvy and ended as a millionaire many times over, sprang from a very ancient Norman family which became obscure in 1603 and rose again to fame two centuries later. I notice that a brewer now a baron, whose beer had a world-wide fame, was the scion of a noble house, the first of whom was Gamellus who flourished when Henry Beauclerc ruled the land from 1100 to 1134. One of the ladies of this famous family was christened by the delightful but unusual name of Temperance, but this was in the reign of Charles I before the brewery was established. Are not such pedigrees as ridiculous as any fiction of the brain? But how much is it to be regretted that the writers of our peerages do not study the Book of Snobs. They would at least avoid parodying it at the order of their ennobled patrons. Disraeli, like Thackeray, exposed this business in his novel “Sybil, or the Two Nations.” I need not say, however, that it was not because of their descent from the great Hogyn Mogyn that the de Mogyns got into society. They pushed, they schemed, they suffered rebuffs undaunted, and at last they won the coveted reward. Lady de Mogyns cut her friends as she ascended, and at last became a recognised power in the great world.