Landor.—The peerage is the park-paling of despotism, arranged to keep in creatures tame and wild for luxury and diversion, and to keep out the people. Kings are to peerages what poles are to rope-dancers, enabling then to play their tricks with greater confidence and security above the heads of the people. The wisest and the most independent of the English Parliaments declared the thing useless. [79] Peers are usually persons of pride without dignity, of lofty pretensions with low propensities. They invariably bear towards one another a constrained familiarity or frigid courtesy, while to their huntsmen and their prickers, their chaplains and their cooks, (or indeed any other man's,) they display unequivocal signs of ingenuous cordiality.
[Footnote 79: Vol. iv. p. 400.]
How many do you imagine of our nobility are not bastards or sons of bastards? [80]
[Footnote 80: Vol. iv. p. 273.]
North.—You have now settled the Peers. The Baronets come next in order.
Landor.—Baronets are prouder than any thing we see on this side of the Dardanelles, excepting the proctors of universities, and the vergers of cathedrals; and their pride is kept in eternal agitation, both from what is above them and what is below. Gentlemen of any standing (like Walter Savage Landor, of Warwick Castle, and Lantony Abbey in Wales,) are apt to investigate their claims a little too minutely, and nobility has neither bench nor joint-stool for them in the vestibule. During the whole course of your life, have you ever seen one among this, our King James's breed of curs, that either did not curl himself up and lie snug and warm in the lowest company, [81] or slaver and whimper in fretful quest of the highest.
[Footnote 81: Vol. iv. p. 400.]
North.—But you allow the English people to be a great people.
Landor.—I allow them to be a nation of great fools. [82] In England, if you write dwarf on the back of a giant, he will go for a dwarf.
[Footnote 82: Vol. iii. p. 135.]