There are certain descriptions of people who, oddly enough, appear to appertain exclusively to the metropolis.

You meet them, every day, in the streets of London, but no one ever encounters them elsewhere; they seem indigenous to the soil, and to belong as exclusively to London as its own smoke, or the dingy bricks and mortar.

We could illustrate the remark by a variety of examples, but, in our present sketch, we will only advert to one class as a specimen--that class which is so aptly and expressively designated as 'shabby-genteel.' Now, shabby people, God knows, may be found anywhere, and genteel people are not articles of greater scarcity out of London than in it; but this compound of the two--this shabby-gentility--is as purely local as the statue at Charing-cross, or the pump at Aldgate.

It is worthy of remark, too, that only men are shabby-genteel; a woman is always either dirty and slovenly in the extreme, or neat and respectable, however poverty-stricken in appearance.

A very poor man, 'who has seen better days,' as the phrase goes, is a strange compound of dirty-slovenliness and wretched attempts at faded smartness.
We will endeavour to explain our conception of the term which forms the title of this paper.