WORK IN LONDON
snuff-boxes or ostentatiously winding up jewelled watches in boxes at the Opera; they panted to attract the attention of an heiress or they wrote dedications and fee'd the footmen of peers.
It would be fanciful to make Buonaparte too responsible for the Modern Type; but he, upon the whole, was the discoverer of the principle: apply yourself to gain the affection of the immense crowd. After his day the mere heiress and the patron as ends of a career vanish. They remain merely as stepping stones.
But the immense crowd is still the indubitable end. If hardly any of us aspire to its suffrage in its entirety, we have, in London at least, discovered the possibilities of capturing its custom in its smallest trifles. To make a corner in collar studs would be rather American: the method in London is to invent, or to buy up the invention of, a collar stud that will appeal straight to the heart of the million, a collar stud that will be not only in all the street vendors' trays, but in all the barbers', all the hosiers', all the drapers' windows. It ought to be very cheap, very picturesquely "put on the market," and just perishable enough to make a constant supply desirable. The man who did put it on the market would immediately become the Napoleon of the Collar Stud.
There are already so many of these: there is at least one, I am not sure that there are not several, of the Press; Napoleons of the Lower Finance find their Waterloos every few years. There is a Napoleon of Pharmacy, one of the Tea Trade, one of Grocery, one
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