I think that perhaps they were more charming, more piquant, more apparently true, when they came out one after another in the periodical, than they are now as collected together.

I think that one at a time would be better than many.

And I think that the first half in the long list of snobs would have been more manifestly snobs to us than they are now with the second half of the list appended.

In fact, there are too many of them, till the reader is driven to tell himself that the meaning of it all is that Adam's family is from first to last a family of snobs.

"First," says Thackeray, in preface, "the world was made; then, as a matter of course, snobs; they existed for years and years, and were no more known than America.