Chapter V: Part II (5)

"Don't fire," whispered he. "Don't fire, so long as you can help it. We ain't alone here. This will do as well," he added, as he stooped down, and drove his long knife into the alligator's eye. The monster gave a frightful howl, and lashed violently with its tail, besprinkling us with the black slimy mud of the swamp.

"Take that!" said the squatter with a grim smile, "and that, and that!" stabbing the brute repeatedly between the neck and the ribs, while it writhed and snapped furiously at him. Then wiping his knife, he stuck it in his belt, and looked keenly and cautiously around him.

"I've a notion there must be a tree trunk hereaway; it ain't the first time I've followed this track. There it is, but a good six foot off." And so saying, he gave a spring, and alighted in safety on the stepping place.

"Have a care, man," cried I. "There is water there. I see it glitter."

"Pho, water! What you call water is snakes. Come on."

I hesitated, and a shudder came over me. The leap, as regarded distance, was a trifling one, but it was over an almost bottomless chasm, full of the foulest mud, on which the mocassin snakes, the deadliest of the American reptiles, were swarming.

"Come on!"

Necessity lent me strength, and, pressing my left foot firmly against the log on which I was standing, and which was each moment sinking with our weight deeper into the soft slimy ground, I sprang across. Carleton followed me.

"Well done!" cried the old man. "Courage, and a couple more such leaps, and we shall be getting over the worst of it."

We pushed on, steadily but slowly, never setting our foot on a log till we had ascertained its solidity with the butts of our guns. The cypress swamp extended four or five miles along the shores of the creek: it was a deep lake of black mud, covered over and disguised by a deceitful bright green veil of creeping plants and mosses, which had spread themselves in their rank luxuriance over its whole surface, and over the branches and trunks of trees scattered about the swamp. These latter were not placed with any very great regularity, but had yet been evidently arranged by the hand of man.

"There seems to have been a sort of path made here," said I to our guide, "for"----

"Silence!" interrupted he, in a low tone; "silence, for your life, till we are on firm ground again. Don't mind the snakes," added he, as the torchlight revealed some enormous ones lying coiled up on the moss and lianas close to us. "Follow me closely."

But just as I stretched forward my foot, and was about to place it in the very print that his had left, the hideous jaw of an alligator was suddenly stretched over the tree-trunk, not six inches from my leg, and the creature snapped at me so suddenly, that I had but just time to fire my gun into his glittering lizard-like eye. The monster bounded back, uttered a sound between a bellow and a groan, and, striking wildly about him in the morass, disappeared.

The American looked round when I fired, and an approving smile played about his mouth as he said something to me which I did not hear, owing to the infernal uproar that now arose on all sides of us and at first completely deafened me.

Thousands, tens of thousands, of birds and reptiles, alligators, enormous bull-frogs, night-owls, ahingas, herons, whose dwellings were in the mud of the swamp, or on its leafy roof, now lifted up their voices, bellowing, hooting, shrieking, and groaning. Bursting forth from the obscene retreat in which they had hitherto lain hidden, the alligators raised their hideous snouts out of the green coating of the swamp, gnashing their teeth, and straining towards us, while the owls and other birds circled round our heads, flapping and striking us with their wings as they passed. We drew our knives, and endeavoured to defend at least our heads and eyes; but all was in vain against the myriads of enemies that surrounded us; and the unequal combat could not possibly have lasted long, when suddenly a shot was fired, followed immediately by another. The effect they produced was magical. The growls and cries of rage and fury were exchanged for howls of fear and complaint; the alligators withdrew gradually into their native mud; the birds flew in wider circles around us; the unclean multitudes were in full retreat. By degrees the various noises died away. But our torches had gone out, and all around us was black as pitch.

"In God's name, are you there, old man?" asked I.

"What! still alive?" he replied with a laugh that jarred unpleasantly upon my nerves, "and the other Britisher too? I told ye we were not alone. These brutes defend themselves if you attack them upon their own ground, and a single shot is sufficient to bring them about one's ears. But when they see you're in earnest, they soon get tired of it, and a couple more shots sent among them generally drive them away again; for they are but senseless squealin' creturs after all."

While the old man was speaking, he struck fire, and lit one of the torches.

"Luckily we have rather better footing here," continued he. "And now, forward quickly; for the sun is set, and we have still some way to go."

And again he led the march with a skill and confidence in himself which each moment increased our reliance on him. After proceeding in this manner for about half an hour, we saw a pale light glimmering in the distance.

"Five minutes more and your troubles are over; but now is the time to be cautious, for it is on the borders of these cursed swamps the alligators best love to lie."

In my eagerness to find myself once more on dry land, I scarcely heard the Yankee's words; and as the stepping places were now near together, I hastened on, and got a little in front of the party. Suddenly I felt a log on which I had just placed my foot, give way under me. I had scarcely time to call out "Halt!" when I was up to the arm-pits in the swamp, with every prospect of sinking still deeper.

"You _will_ hurry on," said the old man with a laugh; and at the same time, springing forward, he caught me by the hair. "Take warning for the future," added he, as he helped me out of the mud; "and look there!"

I did look, and saw half a dozen alligators writhing and crawling in the noxious slime within a few feet of us. I felt a sickening sensation, and for a moment I could not utter a word: the Yankee produced his whisky-flask.

"Take a swallow of this," said he; "but no, better wait till we are out of the swamp. Stop a little till your heart beats quieter. So, you are better now. When you've made two or three such journeys with old Nathan, you'll be quite another man. Now--forward again."

A few minutes later we were out of the swamp, and looking over a field of palmettos that waved and rustled in the moonbeams. The air was fresh, and once more we breathed freely.

"Now then," said our guide, "a dram, and then in half an hour we are at the Salt Lick."

"Where?" asked I.

"At the Salt Lick, to shoot a deer or two for supper. Hallo! what is that?"

"A thunderclap."

"A thunderclap! You have heard but few of them in Louisiana, I guess, or you would know the difference betwixt thunder and the crack of a backwoodsman's rifle. To be sure, yonder oak wood has an almighty echo. That's James's rifle--he has shot a stag.--There's another shot."

This time it was evidently a rifle-shot, but re-echoed like thunder from the depths of the immense forest.

"We must let them know that we're still in whole skins, and not in the maw of an alligator," said the old man, who had been loading his rifle, and now fired it off.

In half an hour we were at the Salt Lick, where we found our guide's two sons busy disembowelling and cutting up a fine buck that they had killed, an occupation in which they were so engrossed that they scarce seemed to notice our arrival. We sat down, not a little glad to repose after the fatigues and dangers we had gone through. When hind and fore quarters, breast and back, were all divided in right huntsman-like style, the young men looked at their father. "Will you take a bite and a sup here?" said the latter, addressing Carleton and myself, "or will you wait till we get home?"

"How far is there still to go?"

"How far? With a good trotting horse, and a better road, three quarters of an hour would bring you there. You may reckon it a couple of hours."

"Then we would prefer eating something here."

"As you will."

Without more words, or loss of time, a haunch was cut off one of the hind-quarters; dry leaves and branches collected; and in one minute a fire was blazing brightly, the joint turning before it on a wooden spit. In half an hour the party was collected round a roast haunch of venison, which, although eaten without bread or any of the usual condiments, certainly appeared to us to be the very best we had ever tasted.

* * * * *

THE ARISTOCRACY OF ENGLAND.

Both the nobility and gentry of this country stand upon a basis so entirely peculiar, that, were it for that cause only, we could not greatly wonder at the perverse misconstructions upon these institutions so prevalent abroad. Indeed the peculiarity of our aristocracy is so effectual for obscurity, that we also, as a nation, are ignorant upon much which marks it characteristically; our own ignorance partly explains, and partly has caused, the continental ignorance. Could it, indeed, be expected that any people should be sensible of their own peculiarities _as_ peculiarities? Of all men, for instance, a Persian would be the last man from whom we could reasonably look for an account of Persia; because those habits of Persians as Orientals, as Mussulmans, and as heretic Mussulmans, which would chiefly fix the attention of Europeans, must be unexciting to the mind of a native.

And universally we know that, in every community, the features which would most challenge attention from a stranger, have been those which the natives systematically have neglected. If, but for two days' residence, it were possible that a modern European could be carried back to Rome and Roman society, what a harvest of interesting facts would he reap as to the habits of social intercourse! Yet these are neglected by Roman writers, as phenomena too familiar, which there was no motive for noticing. Why should a man notice as a singularity what every man witnesses daily as an experience? A satirist, like Juvenal, is obliged, indeed, to notice particular excesses: but this is done obliquely, and so far only as to identify the case he means; besides that often they are caricatured. Or an antiquarian observer, like Athenæus, finds, after ten centuries of social life amongst the same race, a field of observation in the present, which he sees as contrasted with the past which he reads of. It is in that way only that we English know any thing of our own past habits. Some of these are brought forward indirectly in the evidence upon judicial trials--some in dramatic scenes; and, as happened in the case of Athenæus, we see English historians, at periods of great conscious revolution, (Holinshed, for instance,[5] whose youth had passed in the church reformation,) exerting themselves to recover, through old men's recollections, traditions of a social life which they felt to be passing away for ever. Except, however, in these two cases, the one indirect, the other by accident, coinciding with an epoch of great importance, we find little in the way of description, or philosophic examination, toward any sustained record of English civilization as intermitting from one era to another, and periodically resumed. The same truth holds good of civilization on the Continent, and for the same reason, viz. that no nation describes itself, or can do so. To see an object you must not stand in its centre; your own station must be external. The eye cannot see itself, nor a mechanic force measure itself, as if it were its own resistance.

[Footnote 5: An introduction, prefixed to Holinshed, descriptive of domestic life amongst the English, as it may be presumed to have existed for the century before, (1450-1550,) was written (according to our recollection) by Harrison. Almost a century earlier, we have Chief Justice Fortescue's account of the French peasantry, a record _per antiphrasin_ of the English. About the great era of 1688, we have the sketch of contemporary English civilization by Chamberlayne. So rare and distant are the glimpses which we obtain of ourselves at different periods.]

It is easy, therefore, to understand why, amongst the writers of any given nation, we are least entitled to look for an account of the habits or separate institutions distinguishing that nation: since the stimulation of difference least of all exists for those who never see that difference broadly relieved in adverse habits or institutions. To such nation its own aristocracy, like its own climate, seems a positive fact, neither good nor bad, and worthy of little notice, as apparently open to little improvement. And yet to each nation its own aristocracy is often the arbitrating cause, but always the exponent or index of its future political welfare. Laws are important; administration of laws is important; to be Protestant or Popish is important; and so of many other agencies: but, as was said by Harrington in his _Oceana_, there is something in the original idea and in the executive composition of a gentry which cannot be created artificially, and (if wanting) cannot be supplied by substitution. Upon the quality of an aristocracy in critical periods, in those periods when the national stability is menaced by revolution, or the national independence by aggression, depends the national salvation. Let us lay before the reader an illustration.

It is our deliberate conviction, that, from the foundations of civil society, human annals present no second case of infamy equal to that which is presented by the condition of Spain and Portugal from the year 1807 up to our own immediate era. It is a case the more interesting, because two opposite verdicts have been pronounced upon it by men of the greatest ability amongst ourselves. Some, as the present and the late Laureate, have found in the Peninsular struggle with Napoleon, the very perfection of popular grandeur; others, agreeing with ourselves, have seen in this pretended struggle nothing but the last extravagance of thrasonic and impotent national arrogance. Language more frantically inflated, and deeds more farcically abject, surely were never before united. It seems therefore strange, that a difference, even thus far, should exist between Englishmen standing upon the same facts, starting from the sane principles. But perhaps, as regards Mr Wordsworth, he did not allow enough for the long series of noxious influences under which Spain had suffered. And this, at any rate, is notorious--he spoke of the Spanish people, the original stock (unmodified by courtly usages, or foreign sentiments, or city habits) of the Spanish peasantry and petty rural proprietors. This class, as distinguished from the aristocracy, was the class he relied on; and he agreed with us in looking upon the Spanish aristocracy as traitors--that is, as recreants and apostates--from any and every cause meriting the name of national. If he found a moral grandeur in Spain, it was amongst that poor forsaken peasantry, incapable of political combination, who could not make a _national_ party in the absence of their natural leaders. Now, if we adopt the mild temperament of some Spanish writers, calling this "a _schism_ in the natural interests," how shocking that such a schism _could_ have arisen at so dreadful a crisis! That schism, which, as a fact, is urged, in the way of excuse, merely as a possibility, is already itself the opprobrium for Spain never to be washed out. For in Spain, what _was_ the aristocracy? Let us not deceive ourselves, by limiting this term to the feudal nobility or grandees; the aristocracy comprehended every man that would naturally have become a commissioned officer in the army. Here, therefore, read the legend and superscription of the national dishonour. The Spanish people found themselves without a gentry for leading their armies. England possessed, and possesses a gentry, the noblest that the world has seen, who are the natural leaders of her intrepid commonalty, alike in her fleets and in her armies. But why? How and in what sense qualified? Not only by principle and by _honour_--that glorious distinction which poor men can appreciate, even when less sternly summoned to its duties; not only by courage as fiery and as passively enduring as the courage of the lower ranks, but by a physical robustness superior to that of any other class taken separately; and, above all, by a scale of accomplishments in education, which strengthen the claim to command, even amongst that part of the soldiery least capable of appreciating such advantages. In France again, where no proper aristocracy now exits, there is, however, a gentry, qualified for leading; the soldiers have an entire reliance on the courage of their officers. But in Italy, in Spain, in Portugal, at the period of Napoleon, the soldiers knew to a certainty that their officers could not be depended on; and for a reason absolutely without remedy, viz. that in Spain, at least, society is not so organized by means of the press locally diffused, and by social intercourse, as that an officer's reputation could be instantaneously propagated (as with us) whithersoever he went. There was then no atmosphere of public opinion, for sustaining public judgments and public morals. The result was unparalleled; here for the first time was seen a nation, fourteen millions strong, so absolutely palsied as to lie down and suffer itself to be walked over by a body of foreigners, entering in the avowed character of robbers. Colonel Napier, it is true, has contradicted himself with regard to the value of the guerillas; alternately ridiculing then as an imbecile force, and yet accrediting them as neutralizers of regular armies, to an enormous amount. But can a more deplorable record be needed of Spanish ignominy, than that a nation, once the leader of Europe as to _infantry_ and military skill, should, by mere default of an intrepid gentry, be thrown upon the necessity of a brigand force? Equally abject was the state of Portugal. Let any man read the French general Foy's account of the circumstances under which Junot's van, separated by some days' march from the rest of the army, entered Lisbon in 1807. The rural population of Portugal, in most provinces, is a fine athletic race; and foreigners take a false estimate of this race, from the depraved mob of Lisbon. This capital, however, at that time, contained 60,000 fighting men, a powerful fortress, and ships in the river. Yet did Junot make his entry with 6000 of the poorest troops, in a physical sense, that Europe could show. Foy admits, that the majority were poor starveling boys, who could scarcely hold their muskets from cold and continual wet, hurried by forced marches, ill fed, desponding, and almost ripe for the hospital. Vast crowds had assembled to see the entry. "What!" exclaimed the Portuguese, "are these little drowned rats the _élite_ of Napoleon's armies?" Inevitably, the very basest of nations, would, on such an invitation to resistance, have risen that same night, whilst the poor, childish, advanced guard was already beaten to their hands. The French officers apprehended such an attempt, but nothing happened; the faint-hearted people threw away this golden opportunity, never to be retrieved. And why? Because they had no gentry to lead, to rally, or to counsel them. The populace in both countries, though miserably deteriorated by the long defect of an aristocracy whom they could respect, were still sound at the heart; they felt the whole sorrow of their own degradation; and that they would have fought, was soon proved in the case of the Portuguese, when we lent them officers and training; as it was proved also thirty years afterwards in the case of the Spaniards, when Don Carlos, in a time of general peace, obtained good officers from every part of Europe. Each country was forced into redeeming itself by the overflowing upon it of a foreign gentry. And yet, even at the moment of profoundest degradation, such was the maniacal vanity still prevailing amongst the Spaniards, that at one time the Supreme Junta forwarded the following proposal to the British Government:--Men they had; their own independence of foreign aid, in that sense, they had always asserted; money it was, and not armies, which they needed; and they now proposed an arrangement, by which the Spanish armies, as so notoriously the heroes of Europe, should be rendered universally disposable for the task of facing the French in the field, whilst the British (as confessedly unequal to duties so stern) should be entrusted with the garrison duty of the fortresses. "_Illâ se jactet in aulâ Anglia_;" and, since the help of the English navy (which really _was_ good) would be available as to the maritime fortresses, doubtless England might have a chance for justifying the limited confidence reposed in her, when sheltered from the fiercer storms of war by the indomitable lions of Ocana. It is superfluous to say, that the gratitude of Spain, at the close of the war, was every thing that ought to have been expected from this moonstruck vanity at its opening.

Such are the results for nations, when they betray to the whole world an aristocracy bankrupt of honour, emasculated, and slothful. Spoliators so reckless as Napoleon, are not always at hand for taking advantage of this domestic ruin; but it is impossible that a nation, absolutely rich as Spain was in the midst of her relative poverty, can advertise itself for centuries as a naked, defenceless waif, having neither leaders nor principles for organizing a resistance, but that eventually she will hear of a customer for her national jewels. In reality, Spain had been protected for 150 years, by the local interposition of France; had France not occupied the antechamber to the Peninsula, making it impossible for any but a maritime power to attack Spain in strength, Madrid would have echoed to the cannon of the spoiler, at least a century before the bloody 3d of May 1808.[6] In the same way, Austria has furnished for centuries a screen to the Italian Peninsula. Yet, in that case, the want of unity amongst so many subdivisions that were independent states, might be pleaded as an excuse. Pitiable weakness there was in both cases; and "to be weak is to be miserable;" but degradation _by_ degradation, universal abasement of the national energies, as an effect through wilful abasement as a cause; this miserable spectacle has been exhibited in mellow maturity by no Christian nations but those of Spain and Portugal. Both have degenerated into nations of poltrons, and _from_ what ancestors? From those who once headed the baptized in Europe, and founded empires in the other hemisphere.

------"Into what depth thou see'st,
From what height fallen!"------

So that, if this gloomy shadow has crept over luminaries once so bright through the gradual eclipse of their aristocracies, we need no proof more pathetic or terrific of the degree in which great nations, with the whole burden of their honour and their primary interests, are dependent, in the final extremity, upon the quality of their gentry--considered as their sole natural leaders in battle.

[Footnote 6: To say the truth, during the Marlborough war of the Succession, and precisely one hundred years before Murat's bloody occupation of Madrid, Spain presented the same infamous spectacle as under Napoleon; armies of strangers, English, French, Germans, marching, and counter-marching incessantly, peremptorily disposing of the Spanish crown, alternately placing rival kings upon the throne, and all the while no more deferring to a Spanish will than to the yelping of village curs.]

With this previous indication of the unrivalled responsibility pressing upon aristocracies, it is our purpose to dwell a little upon those accidents of advantage arising out of constitution, and those differences of quality, experimentally made known to us in a thousand trials, which sum and express the peculiarities of the British nobility and gentry.

This first point, as to the constitution of our aristocracy, the basis on which it reposes cannot be better introduced than by a literary fact open to all the world, but never yet read in its true meaning. When it became advisable, after the violent death of Charles I., that some public exposure should be applied to the past disputes between the Throne and the Parliament, and some account given of the royal policy--the first question arose naturally upon the selection of a writer having the proper qualifications. Two of these qualifications were found in a French scholar of distinction, Monsieur de Saumaise, better known by his Latinized name of Salmasius. He was undoubtedly a scholar of prodigious attainments: and the first or unconditional qualification for such a task, of great ability and extensive information, could not be denied to him. Here was a subject fitted to fix attention upon any writer, and on the other hand, a writer brilliantly qualified to fix attention upon any subject. Unhappily, a third indispensable condition, viz.--that the writer should personally know England--was entirely overlooked. Salmasius had a fluent command of Latin; and, supported by a learned theme, he generally left a dazzling impression even upon those who hated his person, or disputed his conclusions. But, coming into collision with politics, personal as well as speculative, and with questions of real life, fitted to call for other accomplishments than those of a recluse scholar, it seemed probable that this great classical critic would be found pedantic and scurrilous; and upon the affairs of so peculiar a people, it was certain that he would be found ignorant and self-contradicting. Even Englishmen have seldom thoroughly understood the feud of the great Parliamentary war: the very _word_ "_rebellion_," so often applied to it, involves the error of presuming that in its principles the war was unconstitutional, and in its objects was finally defeated. Whereas the subsequent Revolution of 1688-9 was but a resumption of the very same principles and indispensable purposes under more advantageous auspices--was but a re-affirmation of the principle votes from 1642 to 1645. The one capital point of a responsibility, virtual though not formal, lodged in the crown, and secured through a responsible ministry--this great principle, which Charles I. once conceded in the case of Lord Strafford, but ever afterwards to his dying day repented and abjured, was at length for ever established, and almost by acclamation. In a case so novel, however, to Englishmen, and as yet so unsettled, could it be looked for that a foreigner should master new political principles, to which on the Continent there was nothing analogous?[7] This, it may be alleged, was not looked for. Salmasius was in the hands of a party; and his prejudices, it may be thought, were confluent with theirs. Not altogether. The most enlightened of the English royalists were sensible of some call for a balance to the regal authority; it cannot be pretended that Hyde, Ormond, or Southampton, wished their king to be the fierce "_Io el rey_" (so pointedly disowning his council) of Castile, or the "_L'état? C'est moi_" of France, some few years later. Even for a royalist, it was requisite in England to profess some popular doctrines; and thus far Salmasius fell below his clients. But his capital disqualification lay in his defect of familiarity with the English people, habits, laws, and history.

[Footnote 7: It may be thought, indeed, that as a resident in Holland, Salmasius should have had a glimpse of the new truth; and certainly it is singular that he did not perceive the rebound, upon his Dutch protectors, of many amongst his own virulent passages against the English; unless he fancied some special privilege for Dutch rebellion. But in fact he did so. There was a notion in great currency at the time--that any state whatever was eternally pledged and committed to the original holdings of its settlement. Whatever had been its earliest tenure, that tenure continued to be binding through all ages. An elective kingdom had thus some indirect means for controlling its sovereign. A republic was a nuisance, perhaps, but protected by prescription. And in this way even France had authorized means, through _old_ usages of courts or incorporations, for limiting the royal authority as to certain known trifles. With respect to the Netherlands, the king of Spain had never held absolute power in those provinces. All these were privileged cases for resistance. But England was held to be a regal despotism.]

The English aristocracy furnished a question for drawing all these large varieties of ignorance to a focus. In coming upon the ground of English institutions, Salmasius necessarily began "verba nostra conari," and became the garrulous parrot that Milton represents him. Yet, strange it is, that the capital blunder which he makes upon this subject, was not perceived by Milton. And this reciprocal misunderstanding equally arose in the pre-occupation of their minds by the separate principles on which, for each side, were founded their separate aristocracies. The confusion between the parties arose in connexion with the House of Commons. What _was_ the House of Commons? Salmasius saw that it was contrasted with the House of Lords. But then, again, what _were_ the Lords? The explanation given to him was, that they were the "noblesse" of the land. _That_ he could understand; and, of course, if the other house were antithetically opposed to the Lords, it followed that the House of Commons was _not_ composed of noblesse. But, on the Continent, this was equivalent to saying, that the Commons were _roturiers, bourgeois_--in fact, mechanic persons, of obscure families, occupied in the lowest employments of life. Accordingly Salmasius wrote his whole work under the most serene conviction that the English House of Commons was tantamount to a Norwegian Storthing, viz. a gathering from the illiterate and labouring part of the nation. This blunder was committed in perfect sincerity. And there was no opening for light; because a continual sanction was given to this error by the aristocratic scorn which the cavaliers of ancient descent habitually applied to the prevailing party of the Roundheads; which may be seen to this hour in all the pasquinades upon Cromwell, though really in his own neighbourhood a "gentleman of worship." But for Salmasius it was a sufficient bar to any doubt arising, that if the House of Commons were not nobles, then were they not gentlemen--since to be a gentleman and to be a _titled_ man or noble, on the Continent, were convertible terms. He himself was a man of titular rank, deriving his title from the territory of Saumaise; and in this needy scholar, behold a nobleman of France! Milton, on the other hand, quite incapable of suspecting that Salmasius conceived himself to stand on a higher level than an English senator of the Commons, and never having his attention drawn to the chasm which universally divides foreign from English nobility, naturally interpreted all the invectives of Salmasius against the Lower House as directed against their principles and their conduct. Thus arose an error, which its very enormity has hitherto screened from observation.

What, then, _is_ this chasm dividing our nobility from that upon the Continent? Latterly that point has begun to force itself upon the attention of the English themselves, as travellers by wholesale on the Continent. The sagacious observers amongst them could not avoid to remark, that not unfrequently families were classed by scores amongst the nobility, who, in England, would not have been held to rank with the gentry. Next, it must have struck them that, merely by their numbers, these continental orders of nobility could never have been designed for any thing higher than so many orders of gentry. Finally, upon discovering that there was no such word or idea as that of gentry, expressing a secondary class distinct from a nobility, it flashed upon them that our important body of a landed gentry, bearing no _titular_ honours of any kind, was inexpressible by any French, German, or Italian word; that upon the whole, and allowing for incommunicable differences, this order of gentry was represented on the Continent by the great mass of the "basse noblesse;" that our own great feudal nobility would be described on the Continent as a "haute noblesse;" and that amongst all these perplexities, it was inevitable for an Englishman to misunderstand and to be misunderstood. For, if he described another Englishman as not being a nobleman, invariably the foreigner would presume it to be meant that he was not a gentleman--not of the privileged class--in fact, that he was a plebeian or _roturier_, though very possibly a man every way meritorious by talents or public services. Whereas, on the contrary, we English know that a man of most ancient descent and ample estates, one, in the highest sense, a man of birth and family, may choose, on a principle of pride, (and not unfrequently _has_ chosen,) obstinately to decline entering the order of nobility. Take, in short, the well-known story of Sir Edward Seymour, as first reported in Burnet's _Own Times_; to every foreigner this story is absolutely unintelligible. Sir Edward, at the Revolution, was one, in the vast crowd of country gentlemen presented to the Prince of Orange, (not yet raised to the throne.) The prince, who never had the dimmest conception of English habits or institutions, thought to compliment Sir Edward by showing himself aware of that gentleman's near relationship to a ducal house. "I believe, Sir Edward," said the prince, "that you are of the Duke of Somerset's family?" But Sir Edward, who was the haughtiest of the human race, speedily put an extinguisher on the prince's courtesy by replying, in a roar, "No, your highness: my lord duke is of mine." This was true: Sir Edward, the commoner, was of that branch which headed the illustrious house of Seymour; and the Duke of Somerset, at that era, was a cadet of this house. But to all foreigners alike, from every part of the Continent, this story is unfathomable. How a junior branch should be ennobled, the elder branch remaining not ennobled, _that_ by itself seems mysterious; but how the unennobled branch should, in some sense peculiarly English, bear itself loftily as the depository of a higher consideration (though not of a higher rank) than the duke's branch, this is a mere stone of offence to the continental mind. So, again, there is a notion current upon the Continent, that in England titular honours are put up to sale, as once they really were, by Charles I. in his distresses, when an earldom was sold for L.6000; and so _pro rata_ for one step higher or lower. Meantime, we all know in England how entirely false this is; and, on the other hand, we know also, and cannot but smile at the continental blindness to its own infirmity, that the mercenary imputation which recoils from ourselves, has, for centuries, settled upon France, Germany, and other powers. More than one hundred and thirty thousand French "nobles," at the epoch of the Revolution, how did most of them come by their titles? Simply by buying them in a regular market or bazar, appointed for such traffic. Did Mr St----, a respectable tailor, need baronial honours? He did not think of applying to any English minister, though he was then actually resident in London; he addressed his litanies to the chancery of Austria. Did Mr ----, the dentist, or Mr R----, the banker, sigh for aristocratic honours? Both crossed the Channel, and marketed in the shambles of France and Germany.

Meantime the confusion, which is inveterate upon this subject, arose out of the incompatible grounds upon which the aristocracies of England and the Continent had formed themselves. For the continental there seemed to exist no exclusive privilege, and yet there _was_ one. For the English there existed practically a real privilege, and yet in law there was _none_. On the Continent, no titled order had ever arisen without peculiar immunities and powers, extending oftentimes to criminal jurisdictions; but yet, by that same error which has so often vitiated a paper currency, the whole order, in spite of its unfair privileges, was generally depreciated. This has been the capital blunder of France at all times. Her old aristocracy was so numerous, that every provincial town was inundated with "comptes," &c.; and no villager even turned to look on hearing another addressed by a title. The other day we saw a return from the Legion of Honour: "Such in these moments, as in all the past," France, it appeared, had already indorsed upon this suspicious roll not fewer than forty-nine thousand six hundred and odd beneficiaries. Let the reader think of forty-nine thousand six hundred Knights of the Bath turned loose upon London. Now _ex adverso_ England must have some virtual and operative privilege for _her_ nobility, or else how comes it, that in any one of our largest provincial towns--towns so populous as to have but four rivals on the Continent--a stranger saluted seriously by the title of "my lord," will very soon have a mob at his heels? Is it that the English nobility can dispense with immunities from taxation, with legal supremacies, and with the sword of justice; in short, with all artificial privileges, having these two authentic privileges from nature--stern limitation of their numbers, and a prodigious share in the most durable of the national property? Vainly does the continental noble flourish against such omnipotent charters the rusty keys of his dungeon, or the sculptured image of his family gallows. Power beyond the law is not nobility, is not antiquity. Tax-gatherers, from the two last centuries, have been the founders of most titled houses in France; and the _prestige_ of antiquity is, therefore, but rarely present. But were it otherwise, and that a "noblesse" could plead one uniform descent from crusaders, still, if they were a hundred thousand strong--and, secondly, had no property--and, thirdly, comprehended in their lists a mere gentry, having generally no pretensions at all to ancient or illustrious descent, they would be--nothing. And exactly on that basis reposes the difference between the Continent and England. Eternally the ridiculous pretence of being "noble" by family, seems to claim for obscure foreigners some sort of advantage over the plain untitled Englishman; but eternally the travelled Englishman recollects, that, so far as this equivocal "nobility" had been really fenced with privileges, those have been long in a course of superannuation; whilst the counter-vailing advantages for his own native aristocracy are precisely those which time or political revolutions never _can_ superannuate.

Thus far as to the constitution of the British nobility and those broad popular distinctions which determine for each nobility its effectual powers. The next point is, to exhibit the operation of these differential powers in the condition of manners which they produce. But, as a transitional stage lying between the two here described--between the tenure of our aristocracy as a casual principle, and the popular working of our aristocracy as an effect--we will interpose a slight notice of the habits peculiar to England by which this effect is partly sustained.

One marked characteristic of the English nobility is found in the popular education of their sons. Amongst the great feudal aristocracies of Spain or of Austria, it was impossible that the heirs of splendid properties should be reared when boys in national institutions. In general, there _are_ no national institutions, of ancient and royal foundation, dedicated to education in either land. Almost of necessity, the young _graf_ or _fuerst_, (earl or prince,) _conde_ or _duca_, is committed to the charge of a private tutor, usually a monk. The habits of continental universities have always been riotous and plebeian; the mode of paying the professors, who answer to the college tutors of Oxford and Cambridge, has always been degrading--equally degrading to them and to literature; whilst, in relation to all academic authority, such modes of payment were ruinous, by creating a systematic dependence of the teacher upon the pupil. To this account may be added, that in all countries, where great elementary schools are wanting, the universities are improperly used as their substitutes. Consequently these pupils are too often boys, and not young men, in age; whilst in habits, not belonging to the aristocracy, they are generally gross, unpolished, and illiberal. The great bulk are meant for the professions of the land; and hence, from an early period, the education has been too ecclesiastical in its cast. Even at this day, it is too strictly professional. The landed aristocracy resort to such institutions in no healthy proportions; and the reason lies in their too exclusive dedication to the _military_ service. It is true that, in the rude concussion given to all Germany and Spain by the French revolutionary aggressions, many changes have occurred. In particular, for North Germany, viz. Prussia, Russian Poland, and Saxony, such a new and vast body has arisen of _civil_ functionaries, that a new name and classification for this order has been found necessary amongst British travellers and German economists. But this change has not commensurately affected the German universities. The military character still overshadows the professional. The law is in no esteem, and leads to no political consideration. The church is in the same degradation. The German pastor is too essentially humble in his social condition to present any resistance to feudal or military arrogance. A German clergyman is not, in that emphatic sense which makes itself felt amongst ourselves, a gentleman. The rural pastor of Germany is too often, in effectual weight of character, little more than the "Amen" clerk of our English establishment. If he is treated courteously, as amongst very elevated persons he is, this concession he owes to _their_ high bred refinement, and not to any dignity which clothes himself. _There_ we speak of the reformed churches, whether Calvinist, Lutheran, or the new syncratistic church, manufactured by the present government of Prussia. But in Popish countries, the same tendency is seen on a larger scale: the whole ecclesiastical body, parochial or monastic, retires from the contests of life; and fails, therefore, to contribute any part of the _civil_ resistance needed for making head against the military profession. On the other hand, in England, through the great schools of Eton, Harrow, &c., children even of ducal families are introduced to public life, and to popular sympathies, through the discipline of what may be called miniature republics. No country on earth, it is rightly observed by foreigners, shows so much of aristocratic feeling as England. It cannot, therefore, be denied--that a British duke or earl at Eton, and more especially in his latter stages when approaching the period of his majority, is the object of much deference. Entering upon the time when practically he becomes _sui juris_, he has far too much power and influence to be treated with levity. But it is equally true, that a spirit of republican justice regulates his childish intercourse with his fellow _alumni_: he fights battles on equal terms with any of them, when he gives or receives offence. He plays at cricket, he sails or rows his boat, according to known _general_ regulations. True, that his private tutor more often withdraws a patrician boy from the public sports: but, so long as he is a party of them, he neither is, nor, from the nature of such amusements, could be indulged with any special immunities. The _Condes_ and _Ducas_ of Spain, meantime, have been uniformly reared at home: for this we have the authority of Spanish economists, as also of many travellers. The auspicious conductor of the young grandee's education are usually his mother's confessor and his mother's waiting-women. Thence comes the possibility that a Spanish prince should have degraded himself in the eyes of Europe as a sempster and embroiderer of petticoats. Accordingly, the highest order of the Spanish nobility is said to be physically below the standard of their countrymen, in a degree too apparent to escape general notice; whilst in the same relations our own nobility has been generally pronounced the finest _animal_ race amongst us.

Another great feature in the system of our English training, is the severe separation of children from servants. Many are the families of mere English gentry, totally removed from the nobility, who never permit their children to enter the servants' hall nor the kitchen. And the probable remark upon so rigorous a separation, which an inconsiderate person will make, that it is founded upon aristocratic arrogance, happens to be in the very teeth of the truth. We shall content ourselves with saying, that the comfort as well as benefit of both parties were promoted by such an arrangement; whilst, so far from arguing hauteur, it was the high civil condition of the English servant, which, by forcing respect from his master, first widened the interval between the two ranks, and founded a wholesome repulsion between them. In our own times, we have read descriptions of West India planters admitting the infant children of their slaves to play and sprawl about their saloons: but now, since the slave has acquired the station of a free man, and (from the fact of not having won this station meritoriously, but passively received it as a boon) is too generally disposed to use it in a spirit of defiance, does any man expect such scenes for the future? Through the prevalence of habit, old cases of that nature may happen to survive locally: but in the coming generation, every vestige of these indulgent relations will have disappeared in the gloomy atmosphere of jealous independence. That infant, who had been treated with exemplary kindness as a creature entirely at the mercy of his master, and the living monument of his forbearance, will be thrown sternly upon his legal rights when he has the power of enforcing those rights in so many instances against his patron. This case, from its abruptness, involves unamiable features: but the English case had developed itself too gradually and naturally to be otherwise than purely dignified for both parties. In the age of Beaumont and Fletcher, (say 1610-1635,) gentlemen kicked and caned their servants: the power to do so, was a privilege growing out of the awful distance attached to rank: and in Ireland, at the opening of the present century, such a privilege was still matter of prescriptive usage, and too frequently furnished the matter for a menace. But the stealthy growth of civilization and of civil liberty in England, moved onwards so surely, under the stimulation of manufacturing industry, (making menial service a secondary object for the poor,) that before 1750, a gentleman, forgetting himself so far as to strike a servant, would have been recalled to better thoughts by an action for assault. On the Continent, for the very reason that no such rights had been matured for servants, it was possible to treat them with much more indulgence: because the relations between the two parties were less honourable, allowing to the servant nothing in the way of absolute right; for that very reason, it was possible to treat him as a child who founds his power upon his weakness. In fact, the whole philosophy on this subject will be found practically embodied in the household economy of Rome about the time of Hannibal, as unfolded by Plautus. The relations of master and servant are there exhibited in a state of absolute pessimism: any thing worse, it is beyond the wit of men to imagine. Respect or deference on the part of the slave towards his master, there is none: contempt more maliciously expressed for his master's understanding, familiarity more insolent, it is difficult to imagine. This was in part a tendency derived from republican institutions: but in part also it rests upon the vicious independence in the master of all authority founded upon moral forces. Instant physical coercion, the power of cross, gallows, _pistrinum_, and the domestic scourge--these were the forces which made the Roman master careless of verbal disrespect, indifferent to censure, from them whose opinions were as impotent as those of an infant. The slave, again, on _his_ side, is described as so thoroughly degraded, that he makes the disfiguration of his own person by the knout, the _cancellation_ of his back by stripes and scars--a subject of continual merriment. Between two parties thus incapacitated by law and usage for manly intercourse, the result was exactly such by consummation as on many parts of the Continent it still is by tendency. The master welcomed from his slave that spirit of familiar impertinence which stirred the dull surface of domestic life, whilst, at any moment, a kick or a frown could silence the petty battery when it was beginning to be offensive. Without a drawback, therefore, to apprehend where excesses too personal or stinging could be repressed as certainly as the trespasses of a hound, the Plautine master drew from his servant, without anxiety, the comic services which, in the middle ages, were drawn from the professional "fool." This original vice in the constitution of society, though greatly mitigated, in the course of two centuries from the era of Plautus, by the progress of intellectual luxury, was one main fountain of that coarseness which, in every age, deformed the social intercourse of Romans; and, especially, it was the fountain of that odious scurrility and tongue-license which defeated the majestic impression else sure to have waited on the grand position of the senate. Cicero himself was as great a ruffian in his three functions of oratory, viz. at the bar, in the popular assemblies, and in the senate--he was as foul a libeller--as malignant--and as plebeian in his choice of topics--as any "verna" in Rome when sparring with another "verna." This scandal of Roman society was not, undoubtedly, a pure product, from the vernile scurrility of which we hear so much in Roman writers--other causes conspired; but certainly the fluency which men of rank exhibited in this popular accomplishment of Billingsgate had been at all times sustained by the models of this kind resounding for ever in the streets of Rome, and in the purlieus of great mansions. Mr Coleridge, who had seen nothing but superior amiableness in the familiar sort of friendship existing between a French gentleman and his servant, where, in fact, it had survived as a relic from old political degradations, might consistently proclaim in rapture, when writing to a lady upon the _Philosophic Dialogues_ of Cicero, "What perfect gentlemen were[8] these old Romans!" He who suffers a single feature of amiableness to screen the general misconstruction of social relations, may easily find a spirit of chivalrous courtesy in what, after all, was only a self-protecting meanness, applied to one special case of private intercourse under a brutalizing system applied to all other intercourse between men of public distinction. It is certain that the prevailing relations upon the Continent between master and servant, did, before the French Revolution, and do still, express a vicious structure of society; they have _repeated_, in other forms, the Roman type of civilisation; whilst we, with a sterner exterior, have been the first to stamp respectability upon menial and mechanic labour.

[Footnote 8: And, in reality, this impression, as from some high-bred courtesy and self-restraint, is likely enough to arise at first in every man's mind. But the true ground of the amiable features was laid for the Roman in the counter-force of exquisite brutality. Where the style of public intercourse had been so deformed by ruffianism, in private intercourse it happened, both as a natural consequence, and as a difference sought after by prudence, that the tendencies to such rough play incident to all polemic conversation (as in the _De Oratore_) should be precluded by a marked extremity of refined pleasure. Hence indeed it is, that compliments, and something like mutual adulation, prevail so much in the imaginary colloquies of Roman statesmen. The personal flatteries interchanged in the _De Oratore, De Legibus_, &c., of Cicero, are often so elegantly turned, and introduced so artfully, that they read very much like the high bred compliments _ascribed_ to Louis XIV., in his intercourse with eminent public officers. These have generally a regal air of loftiness about them, and prove the possibility of _genius_ attaching even to the art of paying compliments. But else, in reviewing the spirit of _traffic_, which appears in the reciprocal flatteries passing between Crassus, Antony, Cotta, &c., too often a sullen suspicion crosses the mind of a politic sycophancy, adopted on both sides as a defensive armour.]