at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you.  His intellect was of the shallowest order.  It did not reach to a saw or a proverb.  His mind was in its original state of white paper.  A sucking babe might have posed him.  What was it then?  Was he rich?  Alas, no!  Thomas Tame was very poor.  Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentlefolks, when I fear all was not well at all times within.  She had a neat meagre person, which it was evident she had not sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was noble blood.  She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never thoroughly understood,—­much less can explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of day,—­to the illustrious, but unfortunate house of Derwentwater.  This was the secret of Thomas’s stoop.  This was the thought—­the sentiment—­the bright solitary star of your lives,—­ye mild and happy pair,—­which cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station!  This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering attainments:  and it was worth them altogether.  You insulted none with it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it. Decus et solamen.

Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John Tipp.  He neither pretended to high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter.  He “thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it.”  Yet John was not without his hobby.  The fiddle relieved his vacant hours.  He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean lyre.  He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably.  His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle-street, which, without any thing very substantial appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man’s notions of himself that lived in them, (I know not who is the occupier of them now) resounded fortnightly to the notes of a concert of “sweet breasts,” as our ancestors would have called them, culled from club-rooms and orchestras—­chorus singers—­first and second violoncellos—­double basses—­and clarionets—­who ate his cold mutton, and drank his punch, and praised his ear.  He sate like Lord Midas among them.  But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature.  Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental, were banished.  You could not speak of any thing romantic without rebuke.  Politics were excluded.  A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted.  The whole duty of man consisted in writing off dividend warrants.  The striking of the annual balance in the company’s books (which, perhaps, differed from the balance of last year in the sum of 25_l._ 1_s._ 6_d._) occupied his days and nights for a month previous.  Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of things (as they call them in the city) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a return of the old stirring days