About a score of years before Thackeray tickled English society with pictures of its own snobbery, Mrs. Gore, a young woman, wife of an officer in the Life Guards, saw through the many affectations of the polite world, and in a series of novels, pointed out its ludicrous pretences with lively wit. Mrs. Gore has suffered, however, from the multiplicity of her writings. During the years between 1823, when she wrote her first novel, _Theresa Marchmont_, and 1850, when, quite blind, she retired from the world of letters, she published two hundred volumes of novels, plays, and poems. Her plots are often hastily constructed, her men and women dimly outlined, but she is never dull. No writer since Congreve has so many sparkling lines. She has been likened to Horace, and if we compare her wit with that of Thackeray, who by the way ridiculed her in his _Novels by Eminent Hands_, her humour has qualities of old Falernian, beside which his too frequently has the bitter flavour of old English beer. The Englishman is inclined to take his wit, like his sports, too seriously, and to mingle with it a little of the spice of envy. Mrs. Gore has none of this, however, and skims along the surface of fashionable life with a grace and ease and humour extremely diverting. Her writings are so voluminous that one can only make excerpts at random. One of the liveliest is _Cecil, or the Adventures of a Coxcomb_, a humorous satire on _Vivian Grey_. "The arch-coxcomb of his coxcombical time" had become a coxcomb at the age of six months, when he first saw himself in the mirror, from which time his nurse stopped his crying by tossing him in front of a looking-glass. His curls made him so attractive that at six years of age he was admitted to his mother's boudoir, from which his red-headed brother was excluded, and he superseded the spaniel in her ladyship's carriage. With the loss of his curls went the loss of favour. He did not prosper at school, and was rusticated after a year's residence at Oxford. Here he formed an acquaintance which helped him much in the world of coxcombry. Though this man was not well born, he was an admitted leader among gentlemen. Cecil soon discovered that his high social position was due entirely to his impertinence, and he made this wise observation: "Impudence is the quality of a footman; impertinence of his master. Impudence is a thing to be rebutted with brute force; impertinence requires wit for the putting down." So he matched his wit with this man's impertinence, and they became sworn friends.