“The rebel vales, the rebel dales,
With rebel trees surrounded,
The distant woods, the hills and floods,
With rebel echoes sounded,”
in reading of these marvels. I need scarcely tell you that an English nobleman is morally much as the highest gentleman of a great and polished empire might be supposed to be, and in physical formation very like other men. His ears may, occasionally, be a little more obvious than common, but he possesses no immunity by which they can be made smaller than those of all around him.
I think this feeling of deference, however, is so interwoven with all the habits of thought and reasoning of the nation, that its prestige will long confer an advantage on the nobles of England, unless the torrent of change, by being unnaturally and unwisely dammed, gain so much head as to sweep all before it.
There is no great princely nobility in England, like that which exists on the continent of Europe, and which, royal personages in fact curtailed of their power by the events of this and of past ages, is still deemed worthy of forming royal alliances. In blood, modern alliances, and antiquity, the English nobles, as a class, rank among the lowest of Europe, their importance being owing to the peculiarity of their political connexion with one of the first, if not the very first state of Christendom. I do not know that their private wealth at all surpasses that of the great nobles of the continent, those of France excepted; although there is no inferior nobility here, as there, the younger sons sinking at once into the class of commoners. When the Howards of the fifteenth century were just emerging from obscurity, the Guzmans, the Radziuils, the Arembergs, and hundreds of other houses were sinking from the rank of princes into that of their present condition. The ancestors of Talleyrand were deprived of their possessions as sovereign counts, a century before the first Howard was ennobled. As to the ancient baronies that figure among the titles of the English, they are derived from a class of men who would have been followers, and not the equals, of the Guzmans and Perigords, five centuries since. There appear to me to be two errors prevalent on this subject; that of overrating the relative importance and antiquity of the nobility of England, (except when viewed as a political aristocracy, or since the revolution of 1688) and that of underrating the true condition of the English gentry. All this is not of much importance, though I was lately told of a German princess who spoke of a marriage with the House of Hanover, as a mésalliance!
END OF VOL. I.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This was in 1828; at the return of the writer to England, in 1833, there was a gallery in the House of Lords, and it is hardly necessary to say, that, since that time, both houses have been burnt.