text:  All this good advice was however thrown away; our gentility-monger persevered contriving somehow to gain a passport to some of the _outer_ circles of fashionable life; was ridiculed laughed at and honoured with the _soubriquet_ (he was a pianoforte maker) of the _Semi-Grand_! We know another instance where two young men engaged in trade in the city took a splendid mansion at the West End furnished it sumptuously got some desperate knight or baronet's widow to give parties at their house inviting whomsoever she thought proper at their joint expense