Man-of-Business--this last, of course, with a chortle. So he wagged along and helped to build up the commercial greatness and probity and honour of his country. And when he died he had a magnificent and costly funeral and was attended to his last long home by his weeping relict and sorrowing sons and daughters. Next day there was an account of Mr. Man-of-Business's obsequies in the local papers, and his sons proceeded to carry on the concern. That was forty years ago. To-day the English man of business is a bird of an entirely different and altogether more entrancing feather. Indeed, it is a question whether he has not ceased to be a man of business at all. One might perhaps sum him up best by saying that he has begun to have notions. Whereas he was once the bulwark of the Philistine class, he has now gone over, lock, stock, and barrel--particularly barrel--to the Barbarians. He lives in the manner, style, and odour of Barbarism; and the ruling ambition of his existence is to pass for a "county magnate", a man of birth and leisure, rather than for a man of business. So that he has entirely laid aside the characteristics which distinguished his early and middle Victorian prototype. Breadth, girth, weight, the substantial, the ponderous, are not for him. He does not attribute his success to early rising; he does not boast that his word is his bond; he does not slap his sides when he laughs; he never went to business on a tram-car in his life; and as for his owing all he is to Mrs. Man-of-Business, it is to his association with that charming bechiffoned, bejewelled little lady that he owes all he owes. In other words, the new English man of business has made up his mind that, if life is to be made tolerable at all, it must be made tolerable through social ways. That is to say, if one's income runs to a couple of thousand a year out of a butter business, one must live in precisely the manner of persons whose incomes run to two thousand a year out of lands and hereditaments. "The glass of fashion and the mould of form" for a person who would live is Mayfair. Lords and dukes and the landed gentry have houses in Mayfair; their wives and female relatives flutter round in flashing equipages and brilliant toilettes; there is the theatre, the opera, and other people's houses in the evening, the Park on Sundays, the river in the summer, Scotland in the autumn, and the Riviera for the winter and early spring. Lords and dukes and the landed gentry tread this pretty round, and find both pleasure and dignity in it. Why not the head of the old-established firm of Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co.? Why not, indeed? Old Margarine, founder of the house, never missed a day at the office for forty years. Young Margarine will tell you that, "after all, you know, it is rather amusing to drop into the office sometimes and see the fellows sit up." All the same, the business is a beastly bore, and there are moments when he wishes it at the deuce.