The Fitz-Boodle Papers by William Makepeace Thackeray

This profession, too, is a great, lofty and exceptional one, and / discovered by me considering these things, and deeply musing upon the / necessities of society. Nor let honorable gentlemen imagine that I am / enabled to offer them in this profession, more than any other, a promise / of what is called future glory, deathless fame, and so forth. All that / I say is, that I can put young men in the way of making a comfortable / livelihood, and leaving behind them, not a name, but what is better, a / decent maintenance to their children. Fitz-Boodle is as good a name as / any in England. General Fitz-Boodle, who, in Marlborough's time, and / in conjunction with the famous Van Slaap, beat the French in the / famous action of Vischzouchee, near Mardyk, in Holland, on the 14th of / February, 1709, is promised an immortality upon his tomb in Westminster / Abbey; but he died of apoplexy, deucedly in debt, two years afterwards: / and what after that is the use of a name?

No, no; the age of chivalry is past. Take the twenty-four first men who / come into the club, and ask who they are, and how they made their money? / There's Woolsey-Sackville: his father was Lord Chancellor, and sat / on the woolsack, whence he took his title; his grandfather dealt in / coal-sacks, and not in woolsacks, -- small coal-sacks, dribbling out / little supplies of black diamonds to the poor. Yonder comes Frank / Leveson, in a huge broad-brimmed hat, his shirt-cuffs turned up to his / elbows. Leveson is as gentlemanly a fellow as the world contains, and if / he has a fault, is perhaps too finikin. Well, you fancy him related to / the Sutherland family: nor, indeed, does honest Frank deny it; but entre / nous, my good sir, his father was an attorney, and his grandfather / a bailiff in Chancery Lane, bearing a name still older than that of / Leveson, namely, Levy. So it is that this confounded equality grows and / grows, and has laid the good old nobility by the heels. Look at that / venerable Sir Charles Kitely, of Kitely Park: he is interested about the / Ashantees, and is just come from Exeter Hall. Kitely discounted bills / in the City in the year 1787, and gained his baronetcy by a loan to the / French princes. All these points of history are perfectly well known; / and do you fancy the world cares? Psha! Profession is no disgrace to / a man: be what you like, provided you succeed. If Mr. Fauntleroy could / come to life with a million of money, you and I would dine with him: you / know we would; for why should we be better than our neighbors?