1832.] On the Natural Depreciation of English Nobility. 647 



selves in improved views of the nature and uses of nobility. They, 

 almost all, reformers as well as anti-reformers, seem to labour under 

 erroneous impressions of their importance. Without wishing to dis- 

 parage the comparative liberality of those among them who have ranged 

 themselves on the side of reform, we assert it to be impossible for an 

 observing man not to perceive, that the truth respecting nobility which 

 pervades the untitled intelligent classes has hardly yet dawned upon our 

 titled brethren. All the evidence deducible from what lords continue to 

 say and do, from their looks and general deportment, tends to impress 

 us with the belief, that hardly one of them could yet from conviction 

 adopt for his motto, Non sum qualis eram. 



This darkness of the lordly mind has already proved mischievous to all 

 classes of the community. We will try and show how it is that the 

 English people cannot think so much of lords as they used to do, and that 

 therefore it is unreasonable to expect them any longer to allow lords the 

 power they have been used to possess. 



It is long since the higher classes have reached the extreme point of 

 real refinement. Whilst they were ascending to this, the community 

 at large was really inferior to them, and had, therefore, good reason 

 to acquiesce in their pretensions to superiority. 



Since nothing human is at a stand still, but all things either advance to 

 better or fall back to worse, our nobles, since they reached the summit of 

 real refinement, have been naturally deteriorating into false refinement 

 and luxury. We plebeians, in the mean time, have been availing ourselves 

 of the means within our reach to ascend the moral and intellectual 

 heights, which our betters had surmounted before us. Modern Europe, 

 especially France and England, seems to have reached the crisis of general 

 intelligence, when the old homage paid to rank can no longer with sin- 

 cerity be rendered. This is, to a certain extent, the fault of neither 

 party, and must have ensued, even had the nobles, in falsification of all 

 experience, not receded from the eminence they once occupied. The 

 people in comparatively free states must gradually assimilate their 

 intrinsic qualities to those of their nobility, and cannot in the nature of 

 things retain a full admiration for that nobility, as soon as they find its 

 attainments within their own reach. " I had as lief not be, as live to be 

 in awe of such a thing as myself." Had our nobility never abused their 

 power, the people could not have been fairly expected to allow it to 

 them as soon as they found themselves able to wield it. 



Our nobles, however, have not proved themselves exempt from the 

 common weakness of humanity, but have, at all periods of our history, 

 gladly seized upon whatever the extravagant homage of ignorance has 

 allowed them to grasp. Depravation of moral and political dignity has of 

 course been the consequence of this selfishness ; and now that the com- 

 munity, intelligent enough to discern the ends of government, and the 

 fitness of means to attain them, cannot uphold nobles in misrepresenting 

 those ends, and misapplying those means, these nobles are too blind 

 to recognize the improvement of the community, or too selfish to 

 confess it. 



We cannot now a days, even if we were disposed to force ourselves, 

 think so much of lords as we used to do ; for we have more intelligence 

 of things than we had ; and in proportion as men become better acquainted 

 with things, they naturally think less about persons. 



