Thackeray's mind was at all times peculiarly exercised with a sense of snobbishness.

His appreciation of the vice grew abnormally, so that at last he had a morbid horror of a snob--a morbid fear lest this or the other man should turn snob on his hands.

It is probable that the idea was taken from the early _Snob_ at Cambridge, either from his own participation in the work or from his remembrance of it.

_The Snob_ lived, I think, but nine weeks, and was followed at an interval, in 1830, by _The Gownsman_, which lived to the seventeenth number, and at the opening of which Thackeray no doubt had a hand.

It professed to be a continuation of _The Snob_.