text:  The depreciatory or vilificatory fashionable novel delights in exposing the peccadilloes or imagined peccadilloes (for it is all the same ) of young or old people of fashion: a _gourmand_ peer a titled demirep a "desperate dandy " a black-leg and a few such other respectable characters are dialogued through the customary number of chapters and conducted to the usual catastrophe: virtue is triumphant vice abashed towards the latter end of the last volume; and some low-born hero and heroine introduced to exhibit by contrast the vices of the aristocracy suddenly and without any effort of their own acquire large fortunes perhaps titles which it would have been just as easy to have given them at first--go to church in an orthodox manner and set up a virtuous aristocracy of their own