Page:Early Essays by George Eliot (1919).djvu/51

 1. All men of a thousand a year, who can occasionally afford to give champagne at their dinner parties, may feel authorized to snub any poorer genius of less magnitude than, especially if he live in the same town or neighbourhood, as in that case he can by no means be made available as a lion to be served up to the company with the soups and venison.

2. Men of great or small wit who have established a reputation as diners-out, may give additional zest to their condiments and wine by snubbing any humbler aspirant to the applause of the company. Let them take as their model in this department.

3. Editors of country newspapers who feel themselves and their cause in a precarious condition, and who, therefore, as said of himself, cannot afford to keep a conscience, may find a forlorn hope in snubbing. Let them choose for a victim any individual who presumes to avow an opinion in opposition to their own—and, what is more, to act upon it. We assure the dullest poor fellow of an editor that he may put down such an upstart, and utterly ruin him in the esteem of the majority by keeping a stock of epithets, like so many little missles, to be hurled at him on every favourable occasion: such, for instance, as pseudo-philosopher, man of crotchets, 45