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The great people were infatuated about that snuffy old Scotchman a man behind his day, who had rusted and grown old among the soft diseases of Carlingford, where sharp practice was so seldom necessary; and no opening appeared for young Rider except in the new district, in the smug corner house, with the surgery and the red lamp, and M.R.C.S. on a brass plate on his door.
And it is conceivable that the tenderest and most beautiful reminiscences of a love of departed days may linger with a man who has grown grey, fat, and even snuffy. But it is only in the case of remarkably tidy, neat, and clever old gentlemen that such feelings are likely to attract much sympathy from their juniors. Possibly this world has more of such lingering romance than is generally credited.
In all Iceland welcome and farewell is expressed by a loud kiss, a practice not very delightful for a non-Icelander, when one considers their ugly, dirty faces, the snuffy noses of the old people, and the filthy little children. But the Icelanders do not mind this. They all kissed the priest, and the priest kissed them; and then they kissed each other, till the kissing seemed to have no end.
I really respect some snuffy old stockbroker who's gone on adding up column after column all his days, and trotting back to his villa at Brixton with some old pug dog he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting at the end of the table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight I assure you I know heaps like that well, they seem to me really nobler than poets whom every one worships, just because they're geniuses and die young.
It was a very different thing to see her in the midst of such grounds and in such a house, with all the old-fashioned comforts and luxuries of an ancient and prosperous family around her, and in that of a toiling litterateur in the dingy region of Bloomsbury, where everything was of course respectable in a way, but that way a very inferior and well, snuffy kind of way where indeed you could not dissociate the idea of smoke and brokers' shops from the newest bonnet on Hester's queenly head!
And yet Lewis had told me, with such tears as Snuffy never made him shed, how tender his uncle was to his unworthiness, what allowances he made for the worst that Lewis could say of himself, and what hope he gave him of a good and happy future. "He cried as bad as I did," Lewis said, "and begged me to forgive him for having trusted so much to my other guardian.
One day in the spring of 1851 my father took me to a little hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol and into a stuffy room, where a snuffy old man wearing an ill-fitting wig was busying himself over a pile of documents. He turned about and was very hearty. "Aha, you've brought the boy," said he. And my father said: "My son, you wanted to see General Cass, and here he is."
Marigold, or little Paul Dombey, or Mr. Squeers, or Sam Weller, or Mr. Peggotty, or some other of those immortal personages. We were as conscious, as though we saw them, of the bald head, the spectacles, and the little gaiters of Mr. Pickwick of the snuffy tones, the immense umbrella, and the voluminous bonnet and gown of Mrs.
Carlyle seems to have regarded him at this period as a sort of fallen demigod; and although he sneers, with an almost Mephistophelean distortion of visage, at the philosopher's half inarticulate drawling of speech, at his snuffy, nasal utterance of the ever-recurring "omnject" and "sumnject" yet gleams of sympathy and affection, not unmixed with sorrow, appear here and there in what he says concerning him.
They, were a peculiar-looking pair Lord Mergwain in antiquated dress, not a little worn, and neither very clean nor in very good condition a snuffy, dilapidated, miserable, feeble old man, with a carriage where doubt seemed rooted in apprehension, every other moment casting about him a glance of enquiry, as if an evil spirit came running to the mouth of his eye-caves, looked out, and retreated; and the laird behind him, a head higher, crowned with his red night-cap, and dressed as I have already described, looking older than his years, but bearing on his face the repose of discomfort accepted, his eye keen and clear, and, when turned on his guest, filled with compassion rather than hospitality.