An esquire can offer his hand in marriage to a lady in her own right; plain esquires have married duchesses; they marry baronets' daughters every day of the week.
Thoughts of this kind were as the rise and fall of waves in the bosom of the new esquire.

How often in his Helmstone shop had he not heard titled ladies disdaining to talk a whit more prettily than ordinary women; and he had been a match for the subtlety of their pride--he understood it.
He knew well that at the hint of a proposal from him they would have spoken out in a manner very different to that of ordinary women.

The lightning, only to be warded by an esquire, was in them.

He quitted business at the age of forty, that he might pretend to espousals with a born lady; or at least it was one of the ideas in his mind.
And here, I think, is the moment for the epitaph of anticipation over him, and the exclamation, alas! I would not be premature, but it is necessary to create some interest in him, and no one but a foreigner could feel it at present for the Englishman who is bursting merely to do like the rest of his countrymen, and rise above them to shake them class by class as the dust from his heels.

Alas! then an--undertaker's pathos is better than none at all--he was not a single-minded aspirant to our social honours.