Is like a turnip, there is nothing good of him but that which is
underground; or rhubarb, a contemptible shrub that springs from a noble
root. He has no more title to the worth and virtue of his ancestors than
the worms that were engendered in their dead bodies, and yet he believes
he has enough to exempt himself and his posterity from all things of
that nature for ever. This makes him glory in the antiquity of his
family, as if his nobility were the better the further off it is, in
time as well as desert, from that of his predecessors. He believes the
honour that was left him as well as the estate is sufficient to support
his quality without troubling himself to purchase any more of his own;
and he meddles us little with the management of the one as the other,
but trusts both to the government of his servants, by whom he is equally
cheated in both. He supposes the empty title of honour sufficient to
serve his turn, though he has spent the substance and reality of it,
like the fellow that sold his ass but would not part with the shadow of
it; or Apicius, that sold his house, and kept only the balcony to see
and be seen in. And because he is privileged from being arrested for his
debts, supposes he has the same freedom from all obligations he owes
humanity and his country, because he is not punishable for his ignorance
and want of honour, no more than poverty or unskilfulness is in other
professions, which the law supposes to be punishment enough to itself.
He is like a fanatic, that contents himself with the mere title of a
saint, and makes that his privilege to act all manner of wickedness; or
the ruins of a noble structure, of which there is nothing left but the
foundation, and that obscured and buried under the rubbish of the
superstructure. The living honour of his ancestors is long ago departed,
dead and gone, and his is but the ghost and shadow of it, that haunts
the house with horror and disquiet where once it lived. His nobility is
truly descended from the glory of his forefathers, and may be rightly
said to fall to him, for it will never rise again to the height it was
in them by his means, and he succeeds them as candles do the office of
the sun. The confidence of nobility has rendered him ignoble, as the
opinion of wealth makes some men poor, and as those that are born to
estates neglect industry and have no business but to spend, so he being
born to honour believes he is no further concerned than to consume and
waste it. He is but a copy, and so ill done that there is no line of the
original in him but the sin only. He is like a word that by ill-custom
and mistake has utterly lost the sense of that from which it was
derived, and now signifies quite contrary; for the glory of noble
ancestors will not permit the good or bad of their posterity to be
obscure. He values himself only upon his title, which being only verbal
gives him a wrong account of his natural capacity, for the same words
signify more or less, according as they are applied to things, as
ordinary and extraordinary do at court; and sometimes the greater sound
has the less sense, as in accounts, though four be more than three, yet
a third in proportion is more than a fourth.