They have a very pleasant life of it. They all have a castle on their estates in the country, and in the season guests made up of the same class, with a few poets, novelists and painters to supply the intellect and make variety, indulge in all sorts of festivities, and in town, in the season, their houses are constantly filled, at no matter what expense. Then they each have a membership in all the clubs, and between their country houses, and their town houses, and their clubs, they take pleasure and cultivate gout till death, which has no more respect for them than it has for their oppressed tenants, takes them to a place where there is no difference between a duke and a laborer.
MY LORD.
Gout, by the way, is the fashionable English disease, and a nobleman or a squire of an old family would rather have it than not. It is a sort of mark of gentility, about as essential to his position as his family tree, and no matter how they suffer under it, they bear it with fortitude as one of the evils incident to their rank—an evil that emphasizes their dignity. When Dickens sent Sir Leicester Deadlock into the next world via the family gout, he did not satirize at all. The starved Irish never have the gout, nor do the working people who clamor for some measure of right. The Jack Cades never were so afflicted; only your noble, who toils not, neither does he spin, who goes to bed every night full of every flesh that exists, every wine that is pressed, to say nothing of more potent beverages. It is an accompaniment of “gentle birth,” and very liberal living—living so liberal as to be only possible by those who have other people’s unrequited labor to live upon.
An Englishman dearly loves a lord. There is a cringing servility, a hat-off reverence for noble birth, in England, that to an American is about the most disgusting thing he sees. My Lord may be a thin-haired, weak-legged, half-witted being, capable of nothing under heaven but billiards and horses, loaded to the guards with vices, and only not possessing all of them because of his lack of ability to master them. He may be the most infernal cumberer of the earth in existence, but if he is of noble birth, if he has the proper handle to his name, he is bowed to, deferred to in every possible way. A London tradesman had rather be swindled by a nobleman than paid honestly by a common man, and for one to have permission to put over his door, “Plumber (for instance) to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales,” is to put him in the seventh heaven of ecstacy. The farm population of England show outward deference, but they don’t feel it, and the Irish have so intimate an acquaintance with them that they refuse even lip service and ignore the “hat-off” requirement altogether. This lack of respect for the nobility in Ireland is considered one of the most alarming signs of the times.
I saw a sample of this bowing to royalty, in Scotland. I happened to be doing Holyrood Castle at the same time His Majesty Kalakeau, King of the Sandwich Islands, was in Edinburgh. Now King K. may be a very good man, but in appearance he is an ordinary looking man of half negro blood, and not a very remarkable mulatto at that. Our Fred Douglas would cut up into a thousand of him.
He is a sort of a two-for-a-penny king; but he is a king for all that, and so all the dignitaries of Edinburgh, the mayor, the principal citizens, a duke or two, and a half dozen right honorables showed him the city, and escorted him, and lunched him, and banquetted him. They brought him to Holyrood, and the entire lot of them formed in two ranks, and, with hats in hand, bowed reverently as this king of a few thousand breechless, semi-civilized savages, passed to his carriage. And they glared ferociously upon the few Americans who, not just au fait in such matters, and not knowing precisely who the distinguished colored man was, stood with their hats on their heads, inasmuch as it was raining. Had it been the King of the Fijis, and had it been raining hot pitchforks, these snobs would have stood with uncovered and bowed heads, simply because he was a king. To these people, “there is a divinity which doth hedge a king,” no matter what kind of a king it is. They do the same thing for that venerable old stupidity, Victoria Guelph, precisely as they did it for that amiable imbecility, Albert, her husband, and are doing it every day for those embryo locusts, their children. Burns wrote:—
“Rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
A man’s a man for a’ that.”
