It was one of the most exasperating
attributes of Bounderby, that he not only sang his own praises but
stimulated other men to sing them. There was a moral infection of
clap-trap in him. Strangers, modest enough elsewhere, started up
at dinners in Coketown, and boasted, in quite a rampant way, of
Bounderby. They made him out to be the Royal arms, the Union-Jack,
Magna Charta, John Bull, Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights, An
Englishman's house is his castle, Church and State, and God save
the Queen, all put together. And as often (and it was very often)
as an orator of this kind brought into his peroration,
'Princes and lords may flourish or may fade,
A breath can make them, as a breath has made,'
- it was, for certain, more or less understood among the company
that he had heard of Mrs. Sparsit.
'Mr. Bounderby,' said Mrs. Sparsit, 'you are unusually slow, sir,
with your breakfast this morning.'
'Why, ma'am,' he returned, 'I am thinking about Tom Gradgrind's
whim;' Tom Gradgrind, for a bluff independent manner of speaking -
as if somebody were always endeavouring to bribe him with immense
sums to say Thomas, and he wouldn't; 'Tom Gradgrind's whim, ma'am,
of bringing up the tumbling-girl.
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