Salmagundi; or, The whim-whams and opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, esq. [pseud.] and others. By William Irving, James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. Printed from the original ed., with a preface and notes by Evert A. Duyckinck.

GETTING INTO NOTICE. 165
gave dinners, and they gave balls, they hired cooks, they hired
fiddlers, they hired confectioners; and they would have kept a
newspaper in pay, had they not all been bought up at that time
for the election. They invited the dancing-men and the dancingwomen, and the gormandizers, and the epicures of the city, to
come and make merry at their expense; and the dancing-men,
and the dancing-women, and the epicures, and the gormandizers
did come; and they did make merry at their expense; and they
eat, and they drank, and they capered, and they danced, and
they-laughed at their entertainers.
Then commenced the hurry and the bustle, and the mighty
nothingness of fashionable life; such rattling in coaches I such
flaunting in the streets! such slamming of box doors at the theatre I such a tempest of bustle and unmeaning noise wherever
they appeared I The Giblets were seen here and there and
everywhere; they visited everybody they knew, and everybody
they did not know; and there was no getting along for the Giblets. Their plan at length succeeded. By dint of dinners, of
feeding and frolicking the town, the Giblet family worked themselves into notice, and enjoyed the ineffable pleasure of being
forever pestered by visitors who cared nothing about them; of
being squeezed, and smothered, and parboiled at nightly balls
and evening tea-parties; they were allowed the privilege of forgetting the very few old friends they once possessed; they
turned their noses up in the wind at everything that was not
genteel; and their superb manners and sublime affectation at
length left it no longer a matter of doubt that the Giblets were
perfectly in style.