If you meet a man, lounging up Drury-Lane, or leaning with his back against a post in Long-acre, with his hands in the pockets of a pair of drab trousers plentifully besprinkled with grease-spots: the trousers made very full over the boots, and ornamented with two cords down the outside of each leg--wearing, also, what has been a brown coat with bright buttons, and a hat very much pinched up at the side, cocked over his right eye--don't pity him.

He is not shabby-genteel.

The 'harmonic meetings' at some fourth-rate public-house, or the purlieus of a private theatre, are his chosen haunts; he entertains a rooted antipathy to any kind of work, and is on familiar terms with several pantomime men at the large houses.

But, if you see hurrying along a by-street, keeping as close as he can to the area-railings, a man of about forty or fifty, clad in an old rusty suit of threadbare black cloth which shines with constant wear as if it had been bees-waxed--the trousers tightly strapped down, partly for the look of the thing and partly to keep his old shoes from slipping off at the heels,--if you observe, too, that his yellowish-white neckerchief is carefully pinned up, to conceal the tattered garment underneath, and that his hands are encased in the remains of an old pair of beaver gloves, you may set him down as a shabby-genteel man.

A glance at that depressed face, and timorous air of conscious poverty, will make your heart ache--always supposing that you are neither a philosopher nor a political economist.
We were once haunted by a shabby-genteel man; he was bodily present to our senses all day, and he was in our mind's eye all night.