The feudal character of the English state, now that it is getting
obsolete, glares a little, in contrast with the democratic tendencies.
The inequality of power and property shocks republican nerves. Palaces,
halls, villas, walled parks, all over England, rival the splendor of
royal seats. Many of the halls, like Haddon, or Kedleston, are
beautiful desolations. The proprietor never saw them, or never lived in
them. Primogeniture built these sumptuous piles, and, I suppose, it is
the sentiment of every traveller, as it was mine, 'T was well to come
ere these were gone. Primogeniture is a cardinal rule of English
property and institutions. Laws, customs, manners, the very persons and
faces, affirm it.
The frame of society is aristocratic, the taste of the people is loyal.
The estates, names, and manners of the nobles flatter the fancy of the
people, and conciliate the necessary support. In spite of broken faith,
stolen charters, and the devastation of society by the profligacy of the
court, we take sides as we read for the loyal England and King Charles's
"return to his right" with his Cavaliers,--knowing what a heartless
trifler he is, and what a crew of God-forsaken robbers they are. The
people of England knew as much. But the fair idea of a settled
government connecting itself with heraldic names, with the written and
oral history of Europe, and, at last, with the Hebrew religion, and the
oldest traditions of the world, was too pleasing a vision to be
shattered by a few offensive realities, and the politics of shoemakers
and costermongers. The hopes of the commoners take the same direction
with the interest of the patricians. Every man who becomes rich buys
land, and does what he can to fortify the nobility, into which he hopes
to rise. The Anglican clergy are identified with the aristocracy. Time
and law have made the joining and moulding perfect in every part. The
Cathedrals, the Universities, the national music, the popular romances,
conspire to uphold the heraldry, which the current politics of the day
are sapping. The taste of the people is conservative. They are proud
of the castles, and of the language and symbol of chivalry. Even the
word "lord" is the luckiest style that is used in any language to
designate a patrician. The superior education and manners of the nobles
recommend them to the country.
The Norwegian pirate got what he could, and held it for his eldest son.
The Norman noble, who was the Norwegian pirate baptized, did likewise.
There was this advantage of Western over Oriental nobility, that this
was recruited from below. English history is aristocracy with the doors
open. Who has courage and faculty, let him come in. Of course, the
terms of admission to this club are hard and high. The selfishness of
the nobles comes in aid of the interest of the nation to require signal
merit. Piracy and war gave place to trade, politics, and letters; the
war-lord to the law-lord; the law-lord to the merchant and the
mill-owner; but the privilege was kept, whilst the means of obtaining it
were changed.
The foundations of these families lie deep in Norwegian exploits by sea,
and Saxon sturdiness on land. All nobility in its beginnings was
somebody's natural superiority. The things these English have done were
not done without peril of life, nor without wisdom and conduct; and the
first hands, it may be presumed, were often challenged to show their
right to their honors, or yield them to better men. "He that will be a
head, let him be a bridge," said the Welsh chief Benegridran, when he
carried all his men over the river on his back. "He shall have the
book," said the mother of Alfred, "who can read it"; and Alfred won it
by that title: and I make no doubt that feudal tenure was no sinecure,
but baron, knight, and tenant often had their memories refreshed, in
regard to the service by which they held their lands. The De Veres,
Bohuns, Mowbrays, and Plantagenets were not addicted to contemplation.
The Middle Age adorned itself with proofs of manhood and devotion. Of
Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, the Emperor told Henry V. that no
Christian king had such another knight for wisdom, nurture, and manhood,
and caused him to be named, "Father of curtesie." "Our success in
France," says the historian, "lived and died with him."[13]
[13] Fuller's Worthies, II. p. 472.
The war-lord earned his honors, and no donation of land was large, as
long as it brought the duty of protecting it, hour by hour, against a
terrible enemy. In France and in England, the nobles were, down to a
late day, born and bred to war; and the duel, which in peace still held
them to the risks of war, diminished the envy that, in trading and
studious nations, would else have pried into their title. They were
looked on as men who played high for a great stake.
Great estates are not sinecures, if they are to be kept great. A
creative economy is the fuel of magnificence. In the same line of
Warwick, the successor next but one to Beauchamp was the stout earl of
Henry VI. and Edward IV. Few esteemed themselves in the mode, whose
heads were not adorned with the black ragged staff, his badge. At his
house in London, six oxen were daily eaten at a breakfast; and every
tavern was full of his meat; and who had any acquaintance in his family,
should have as much boiled and roast as he could carry on a long dagger.
The new age brings new qualities into request, the virtues of pirates
gave way to those of planters, merchants, senators, and scholars.
Comity, social talent, and fine manners, no doubt, have had their part
also. I have met somewhere with a historiette, which, whether more or
less true in its particulars, carries a general truth. "How came the
Duke of Bedford by his great landed estates? His ancestor having
travelled on the continent, a lively, pleasant man, became the companion
of a foreign prince wrecked on the Dorsetshire coast, where Mr. Russell
lived. The prince recommended him to Henry VIII., who, liking his
company, gave him a large share of the plundered church lands."
The pretence is that the noble is of unbroken descent from the Norman,
and has never worked for eight hundred years. But the fact is
otherwise. Where is Bohun? where is De Vere? The lawyer, the farmer,
the silk-mercer, lies _perdu_ under the coronet, and winks to the
antiquary to say nothing; especially skilful lawyers, nobody's sons, who
did some piece of work at a nice moment for government, and were
rewarded with ermine.
The national tastes of the English do not lead them to the life of the
courtier, but to secure the comfort and independence of their homes.
The aristocracy are marked by their predilection for country-life. They
are called the county-families. They have often no residence in London,
and only go thither for a short time, during the season, to see the
opera; but they concentrate the love and labor of many generations on
the building, planting, and decoration of their homesteads. Some of
them are too old and too proud to wear titles, or, as Sheridan said of
Coke, "disdain to hide their head in a coronet"; and some curious
examples are cited to show the stability of English families. Their
proverb is, that, fifty miles from London, a family will last a hundred
years; at a hundred miles, two hundred years; and so on; but I doubt
that steam, the enemy of time, as well as of space, will disturb these
ancient rules. Sir Henry Wotton says of the first Duke of Buckingham:
"He was born at Brookeby in Leicestershire, where his ancestors had
chiefly continued about the space of four hundred years, rather without
obscurity, than with any great lustre."[14] Wraxall says, that, in
1781, Lord Surrey, afterwards Duke of Norfolk, told him, that when the
year 1783 should arrive, he meant to give a grand festival to all the
descendants of the body of Jockey of Norfolk, to mark the day when the
dukedom should have remained three hundred years in their house, since
its creation by Richard III. Pepys tells us, in writing of an Earl
Oxford, in 1666, that the honor had now remained in that name and blood
six hundred years.
[14] Reliquiae Wottonianae, p. 208.
This long descent of families and this cleaving through ages to the same
spot of ground captivates the imagination. It has too a connection with
the names of the towns and districts of the country.
The names are excellent,--an atmosphere of legendary melody spread over
the land. Older than all epics and histories, which clothe a nation,
this undershirt sits close to the body. What history too, and what
stores of primitive and savage observation, it infolds! Cambridge is
the bridge of the Cam; Sheffield, the field of the river Sheaf;
Leicester, the _castra_ or camp of the Lear or Leir (now Soar);
Rochdale, of the Roch; Exeter or Excester, the _castra_ of the Ex;
Exmouth, Dartmouth, Sidmouth, Teignmouth, the mouths of the Ex, Dart,
Sid, and Teign Rivers. Waltham is strong town; Radcliffe is red cliff;
and so on;--a sincerity and use in naming very striking to an American,
whose country is whitewashed all over by unmeaning names, the cast-off
clothes of the country from which its emigrants came; or, named at a
pinch from a psalm-tune. But the English are those "barbarians" of
Jamblichus, who "are stable in their manners, and firmly continue to
employ the same words, which also are dear to the gods."
'T is an old sneer, that the Irish peerage drew their names from
playbooks. The English lords do not call their lands after their own
names, but call themselves after their lands; as if the man represented
the country that bred him; and they rightly wear the token of the glebe
that gave them birth; suggesting that the tie is not cut, but that there
in London,--the crags of Argyle, the kail of Cornwall, the downs of
Devon, the iron of Wales, the clays of Stafford, are neither forgetting
nor forgotten, but know the man who was born by them, and who, like the
long line of his fathers, has carried that crag, that shore, dale, fen,
or woodland in his blood and manners. It has, too, the advantage of
suggesting responsibleness. A susceptible man could not wear a name
which represented in a strict sense a city or a county of England,
without hearing in it a challenge to duty and honor.
The predilection of the patricians for residence in the country,
combined with the degree of liberty possessed by the peasant, makes the
safety of the English hall. Mirabeau wrote prophetically from England,
in 1784: "If revolution break out in France, I tremble for the
aristocracy: their chaaeaux will be reduced to ashes, and their blood
spilt in torrents. The English tenant would defend his lord to the last
extremity." The English go to their estates for grandeur. The French
live at court, and exile themselves to their estates for economy. As
they do not mean to live with their tenants, they do not conciliate
them, but wring from them the last sous. Evelyn writes from Blois, in
1644: "The wolves are here in such numbers, that they often come and
take children out of the streets; yet will not the Duke, who is
sovereign here, permit them to be destroyed."
In evidence of the wealth amassed by ancient families, the traveller is
shown the palaces in Piccadilly, Burlington House, Devonshire House,
Lansdowne House in Berkshire Square, and, lower down in the city, a few
noble houses which still withstand in all their amplitude the
encroachment of streets. The Duke of Bedford includes or included a
mile square in the heart of London, where the British Museum, once
Montague House, now stands, and the land occupied by Woburn Square,
Bedford Square, Russell Square. The Marquis of Westminster built within
a few years the series of squares called Belgravia. Stafford House is
the noblest palace in London. Northumberland House holds its place by
Charing Cross. Chesterfield House remains in Audley Street. Sion House
and Holland House are in the suburbs. But most of the historical houses
are masked or lost in the modern uses to which trade or charity has
converted them. A multitude of town palaces contain inestimable
galleries of art.
In the country, the size of private estates is more impressive. From
Barnard Castle I rode on the highway twenty-three miles from High Force,
a fall of the Tees, towards Darlington, past Raby Castle, through the
estate of the Duke of Cleveland. The Marquis of Breadalbane rides out
of his house a hundred miles in a straight line to the sea, on his own
property. The Duke of Sutherland owns the county of Sutherland,
stretching across Scotland from sea to sea. The Duke of Devonshire,
besides his other estates, owns 96,000 acres in the county of Derby.
The Duke of Richmond has 40,000 acres at Goodwood, and 300,000 at Gordon
Castle. The Duke of Norfolk's park in Sussex is fifteen miles in
circuit. An agriculturist bought lately the island of Lewes, in
Hebrides, containing 500,000 acres. The possessions of the Earl of
Lonsdale gave him eight seats in Parliament. This is the Heptarchy
again; and before the Reform of 1832, one hundred and fifty-four persons
sent three hundred and seven members to Parliament. The borough-mongers
governed England.
These large domains are growing larger. The great estates are absorbing
the small freeholds. In 1786, the soil of England was owned by 250,000
corporations and proprietors; and, in 1822, by 32,000. These broad
estates find room in this narrow island. All over England, scattered at
short intervals among ship-yards, mills, mines, and forges, are the
paradises of the nobles, where the livelong repose and refinement are
heightened by the contrast with the roar of industry and necessity, out
of which you have stepped aside.
I was surprised to observe the very small attendance usually in the
House of Lords. Out of 573 peers, on ordinary days, only twenty or
thirty. Where are they? I asked. "At home on their estates, devoured
by _ennui_, or in the Alps, or up the Rhine, in the Harz Mountains, or
in Egypt, or in India, on the Ghauts." But, with such interests at
stake, how can these men afford to neglect them? "O," replied my
friend, "why should they work for themselves, when every man in England
works for them, and will suffer before they come to harm?" The hardest
radical instantly uncovers, and changes his tone to a lord. It was
remarked on the 10th April, 1848 (the day of the Chartist
demonstration), that the upper classes were, for the first time,
actively interesting themselves in their own defence, and men of rank
were sworn special constables, with the rest. "Besides, why need they
sit out the debate? Has not the Duke of Wellington, at this moment,
their proxies,--the proxies of fifty peers in his pocket, to vote for
them, if there be an emergency?"
It is however true, that the existence of the House of Peers as a branch
of the government entitles them to fill half the Cabinet; and their
weight of property and station gives them a virtual nomination of the
other half; whilst they have their share in the subordinate offices, as
a school of training. This monopoly of political power has given them
their intellectual and social eminence in Europe. A few law lords and a
few political lords take the brunt of public business. In the army, the
nobility fill a large part of the high commissions, and give to these a
tone of expense and splendor, and also of exclusiveness. They have
borne their full share of duty and danger in this service; and there are
few noble families which have not paid in some of their members, the
debt of life or limb, in the sacrifices of the Russian war. For the
rest, the nobility have the lead in matters of state, and of expense; in
questions of taste, in social usages, in convivial and domestic
hospitalities. In general, all that is required of them is to sit
securely, to preside at public meetings, to countenance charities, and
to give the example of that decorum so dear to the British heart.
If one asks, in the critical spirit of the day, what service this class
have rendered?--uses appear, or they would have perished long ago. Some
of these are easily enumerated, others more subtle make a part of
unconscious history. Their institution is one step in the progress of
society. For a race yields a nobility in some form, however we name the
lords, as surely as it yields women.
The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated men, born to
wealth and power, who have run through every country, and kept in every
country the best company, have seen every secret of art and nature, and,
when men of any ability or ambition, have been consulted in the conduct
of every important action. You cannot wield great agencies without
lending yourself to them, and when it happens that the spirit of the
earl meets his rank and duties, we have the best examples of behavior.
Power of any kind readily appears in the manners; and beneficent power,
_le talent de bien faire_, gives a majesty which cannot be concealed or
resisted.
These people seem to gain as much as they lose by their position. They
survey society, as from the top of St. Paul's, and if they never hear
plain truth from men, they see the best of everything, in every kind,
and they see things so grouped and amassed as to infer easily the sum
and genius, instead of tedious particularities. Their good behavior
deserves all its fame, and they have that simplicity, and that air of
repose, which are the finest ornament of greatness.
The upper classes have only birth, say the people here, and not
thoughts. Yes, but they have manners, and 't is wonderful, how much
talent runs into manners:--nowhere and never so much as in England.
They have the sense of superiority, the absence of all the ambitious
effort which disgusts in the aspiring classes, a pure tone of thought
and feeling, and the power to command, among their other luxuries, the
presence of the most accomplished men in their festive meetings.
Loyalty is in the English a sub-religion. They wear the laws as
ornaments, and walk by their faith in their painted May-Fair, as if
among the forms of gods. The economist of 1855 who asks, of what use
are the lords? may learn of Franklin to ask, of what use is a baby? They
have been a social church proper to inspire sentiments mutually honoring
the lover and the loved. Politeness is the ritual of society, as prayers
are of the church; a school of manners, and a gentle blessing to the age
in which it grew. 'T is a romance adorning English life with a larger
horizon; a midway heaven, fulfilling to their sense their fairy tales
and poetry. This, just as far as the breeding of the nobleman, really
made him brave, handsome, accomplished, and great-hearted.
On general grounds, whatever tends to form manners, or to finish men,
has a great value. Every one who has tasted the delight of friendship,
will respect every social guard which our manners can establish, tending
to secure from the intrusion of frivolous and distasteful people. The
jealousy of every class to guard itself, is a testimony to the reality
they have found in life. When a man once knows that he has done justice
to himself, let him dismiss all terrors of aristocracy as superstitions,
so far as he is concerned. He who keeps the door of a mine, whether of
cobalt, or mercury, or nickel, or plumbago, securely knows that the
world cannot do without him. Everybody who is real is open and ready for
that which is also real.
Besides, these are they who make England that strongbox and museum it
is; who gather and protect works of art, dragged from amidst burning
cities and revolutionary countries, and brought hither out of all the
world. I look with respect at houses six, seven, eight hundred, or,
like Warwick Castle, nine hundred years old. I pardoned high park
fences, when I saw, that, besides does and pheasants, these have
preserved Arundel marbles, Townley galleries, Howard and Spenserian
libraries, Warwick and Portland vases, Saxon manuscripts, monastic
architectures, millennial trees, and breeds of cattle elsewhere extinct.
In these manors, after the frenzy of war and destruction subsides a
little, the antiquary finds the frailest Roman jar, or crumbling
Egyptian mummy-case, without so much as a new layer of dust, keeping the
series of history unbroken, and waiting for its interpreter, who is sure
to arrive. These lords are the treasurers and librarians of mankind,
engaged by their pride and wealth to this function.
Yet there were other works for British dukes to do. George Loudon,
Quintinye, Evelyn, had taught them to make gardens. Arthur Young,
Bakewell, and Mechi have made them agricultural. Scotland was a camp
until the day of Culloden. The Dukes of Athol, Sutherland, Buccleugh,
and the Marquis of Breadalbane have introduced the rape-culture, the
sheep-farm, wheat, drainage, the plantation of forests, the artificial
replenishment of lakes and ponds with fish, the renting of
game-preserves. Against the cry of the old tenantry, and the sympathetic
cry of the English press, they have rooted out and planted anew, and now
six millions of people live, and live better on the same land that fed
three millions.
The English barons, in every period, have been brave and great, after
the estimate and opinion of their times. The grand old halls scattered
up and down in England are dumb vouchers to the state and broad
hospitality of their ancient lords. Shakspeare's portraits of good Duke
Humphrey, of Warwick, of Northumberland, of Talbot, were drawn in strict
consonance with the traditions. A sketch of the Earl of Shrewsbury,
from the pen of Queen Elizabeth's Archbishop Parker;[15] Lord Herbert of
Cherbury's autobiography; the letters and essays of Sir Philip Sidney;
the anecdotes preserved by the antiquaries Fuller and Collins; some
glimpses at the interiors of noble houses, which we owe to Pepys and
Evelyn; the details which Ben Jonson's masques (performed at Kenilworth,
Althorpe, Belvoir, and other noble houses) record or suggest; down to
Aubrey's passages of the life of Hobbes in the house of the Earl of
Devon, are favorable pictures of a romantic style of manners. Penshurst
still shines for us, and its Christmas revels, "where logs not burn, but
men." At Wilton House, the "Arcadia" was written, amidst conversations
with Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, a man of no vulgar mind, as his own
poems declare him. I must hold Ludlow Castle an honest house, for which
Milton's "Comus" was written, and the company nobly bred which performed
it with knowledge and sympathy. In the roll of nobles are found poets,
philosophers, chemists, astronomers, also men of solid virtues and of
lofty sentiments; often they have been the friends and patrons of genius
and learning, and especially of the fine arts; and at this moment,
almost every great house has its sumptuous picture-gallery.
[15] Dibdin's Literary Reminiscences, Vol. I. xii.
Of course, there is another side to this gorgeous show. Every victory
was the defeat of a party only less worthy. Castles are proud things,
but 't is safest to be outside of them. War is a foul game, and yet war
is not the worst part of aristocratic history. In later times, when the
baron, educated only for war, with his brains paralyzed by his stomach,
found himself idle at home, he grew fat and wanton, and a sorry brute.
Grammont, Pepys, and Evelyn show the kennels to which the king and court
went in quest of pleasure. Prostitutes taken from the theatres were
made duchesses, their bastards dukes and earls. "The young men sat
uppermost, the old serious lords were out of favor." The discourse that
the king's companions had with him was "poor and frothy." No man who
valued his head might do what these pot-companions familiarly did with
the king. In logical sequence of these dignified revels, Pepys can tell
the beggarly shifts to which the king was reduced, who could not find
paper at his council table, and "no handkerchers" in his wardrobe, "and
but three bands to his neck," and the linen-draper and the stationer
were out of pocket, and refusing to trust him, and the baker will not
bring bread any longer. Meantime, the English Channel was swept, and
London threatened by the Dutch fleet, manned too by English sailors,
who, having been cheated of their pay for years by the king, enlisted
with the enemy.
The Selwyn correspondence in the reign of George III. discloses a
rottenness in the aristocracy, which threatened to decompose the state.
The sycophancy and sale of votes and honor, for place and title;
lewdness, gaming, smuggling, bribery, and cheating; the sneer at the
childish indiscretion of quarrelling with ten thousand a year; the want
of ideas; the splendor of the titles, and the apathy of the nation, are
instructive, and make the reader pause and explore the firm bounds which
confined these vices to a handful of rich men. In the reign of the
Fourth George, things do not seem to have mended, and the rotten
debauchee let down from a window by an inclined plane into his coach to
take the air, was a scandal to Europe which the ill fame of his queen
and of his family did nothing to retrieve.
Under the present reign, the perfect decorum of the Court is thought to
have put a check on the gross vices of the aristocracy; yet gaming,
racing, drinking, and mistresses bring them down, and the democrat can
still gather scandals, if he will. Dismal anecdotes abound, verifying
the gossip of the last generation of dukes served by bailiffs, with all
their plate in pawn; of great lords living by the showing of their
houses; and of an old man wheeled in his chair from room to room, whilst
his chambers are exhibited to the visitor for money: of ruined dukes and
earls living in exile for debt. The historic names of the Buckinghams,
Beauforts, Marlboroughs, and Hertfords have gained no new lustre, and
now and then darker scandals break out, ominous as the new chapters
added under the Orleans dynasty to the "_Causes Celebres_" in France.
Even peers, who are men of worth and public spirit, are overtaken and
embarrassed by their vast expense. The respectable Duke of Devonshire,
willing to be the Mecaenas and Lucullus of his island, is reported to
have said that he cannot live at Chatsworth but one month in the year.
Their many houses eat them up. They cannot sell them, because they are
entailed. They will not let them, for pride's sake, but keep them
empty, aired, and the grounds mown and dressed, at a cost of four or
five thousand pounds a year. The spending is for a great part in
servants, in many houses exceeding a hundred.
Most of them are only chargeable with idleness, which, because it
squanders such vast power of benefit, has the mischief of crime. "They
might be little Providences on earth," said my friend, "and they are,
for the most part, jockeys and fops." Campbell says: "Acquaintance with
the nobility, I could never keep up. It requires a life of idleness,
dressing, and attendance on their parties." I suppose, too, that a
feeling of self-respect is driving cultivated men out of this society,
as if the noble were slow to receive the lessons of the times, and had
not learned to disguise his pride of place. A man of wit, who is also
one of the celebrities of wealth and fashion, confessed to his friend,
that he could not enter their houses without being made to feel that
they were great lords, and he a low plebeian. With the tribe of
_artistes_, including the musical tribe, the patrician morgue keeps no
terms, but excludes them. When Julia Grisi and Mario sang at the houses
of the Duke of Wellington and other grandees, a ribbon was stretched
between the singer and the company.
When every noble was a soldier, they were carefully bred to great
personal prowess. The education of a soldier is a simpler affair than
that of an earl in the nineteenth century. And this was very seriously
pursued; they were expert in every species of equitation, to the most
dangerous practices, and this down to the accession of William of
Orange. But graver men appear to have trained their sons for civil
affairs. Elizabeth extended her thought to the future; and Sir Philip
Sidney in his letter to his brother, and Milton and Evelyn, gave plain
and hearty counsel. Already, too, the English noble and squire were
preparing for the career of the country-gentleman, and his peaceable
expense. They went from city to city, learning receipts to make
perfumes, sweet powders, pomanders, antidotes, gathering seeds, gems,
coins, and divers curiosities, preparing for a private life thereafter,
in which they should take pleasure in these recreations.
All advantages given to absolve the young patrician from intellectual
labor are of course mistaken. "In the university, noblemen are exempted
from the public exercises for the degree, etc., by which they attain a
degree called honorary. At the same time the fees they must pay for
matriculation, and on all other occasions, are much higher."[16] Fuller
records "the observation of foreigners, that Englishmen, by making their
children gentlemen, before they are men, cause they are so seldom wise
men." This cockering justifies Dr. Johnson's bitter apology for
primogeniture, "that it makes but one fool in a family."
[16] Huber, History of English Universities.
The revolution in society has reached this class. The great powers of
industrial art have no exclusion of name or blood. The tools of our
time, namely, steam, ships, printing, money, and popular education,
belong to those who can handle them; and their effect has been, that
advantages once confined to men of family are now open to the whole
middle class. The road that grandeur levels for his coach, toil can
travel in his cart.
This is more manifest every day, but I think it is true throughout
English history. English history, wisely read, is the vindication of
the brain of that people. Here, at last, were climate and condition
friendly to the working faculty. Who now will work and dare, shall
rule. This is the charter, or the chartism, which fogs, and seas, and
rains proclaimed,--that intellect and personal force should make the
law; that industry and administrative talent should administer; that
work should wear the crown. I know that not this, but something else is
pretended. The fiction with which the noble and the bystander equally
please themselves is, that the former is of unbroken descent from the
Norman, and so has never worked for eight hundred years. All the
families are new, but the name is old, and they have made a covenant
with their memories not to disturb it. But the analysis of the peerage
and gentry shows the rapid decay and extinction of old families, the
continual recruiting of these from new blood. The doors, though
ostentatiously guarded, are really open, and hence the power of the
bribe. All the barriers to rank only whet the thirst, and enhance the
prize. "Now," said Nelson, when clearing for battle, "a peerage, or
Westminster Abbey!" "I have no illusion left," said Sidney Smith, "but
the Archbishop of Canterbury." "The lawyers," said Burke, "are only
birds of passage in this House of Commons," and then added, with a new
figure, "they have their best bower anchor in the House of Lords."
Another stride that has been taken, appears in the perishing of
heraldry. Whilst the privileges of nobility are passing to the middle
class, the badge is discredited, and the titles of lordship are getting
musty and cumbersome. I wonder that sensible men have not been already
impatient of them. They belong, with wigs, powder, and scarlet coats,
to an earlier age, and may be advantageously consigned, with paint and
tattoo, to the dignitaries of Australia and Polynesia.
A multitude of English, educated at the universities, bred into their
society with manners, ability, and the gifts of fortune, are every day
confronting the peers on a footing of equality, and outstripping them,
as often, in the race of honor and influence. That cultivated class is
large and ever enlarging. It is computed that, with titles and without,
there are seventy thousand of these people coming and going in London,
who make up what is called high society. They cannot shut their eyes to
the fact that an untitled nobility possess all the power without the
inconveniences that belong to rank, and the rich Englishman goes over
the world at the present day, drawing more than all the advantages which
the strongest of his kings could command.