86 History of the E^iglish Landed Interest. 



higher breeding." ^ Now more than ever was needed a spirit 

 of moderation and reconciliation between the various classes 

 composing the Landed Interest, and much of that genial 

 relationship which still exists between squire and tenant owes 

 its origin to the Ladies Bountiful and Sir Roger de Coverleys 

 of this period. 



Even the exclusive blue blood of the old feudal aristocracy 

 had been infused with a spirit of moderation from that same 

 source which had so often before benefited other classes of 

 the Landed Interest. For about this time a graft of that 

 useful but exotic growth, the Flemish aristocracy, came to be 

 united with the ancient stem of our native nobility. No one 

 has quite realised how narrow and bigoted the original Nor- 

 man patrician might have grown without this introduction 

 of a foreign strain into the old stock — Auverquerque, Zuler- 

 stein, Schomberg, Seymour, Bentinck, Cavendish, Keppel, and 

 many others established what Lord Beaconsfield has called 

 the Venetian Constitution, and brought in those liberal ideas 

 which no doubt have often tempered the innate and perhaps 

 bigoted conservatism of our House of Lords, and enabled it 

 to guide and ride rather than resist the storm. Indeed, a more 

 tolerant spirit seems to have permeated all grades of the 

 English gentry. The term gentleman, for a long time limited 

 to persons of good family, bearing a coat of arms, but without 

 any particular title, was now stretched into covering not 

 only the more exalted degrees, such as the nobility, knights, 

 and esquires, but any individual who had acquired a good 

 education and looked gentlemanlike.^ 



In representatives of the Landed Interest below the grades 

 just mentioned, we find, on the contrary, a more exclusive 

 social tendency. The yeomen were not only increasing rapidly 

 in numbers, but also in importance. All were freeholders of 

 lands or tenements inheritable by a perpetual right to them 

 and their heirs for ever. Many had estates averaging forty 

 or fifty pounds a year ; not a few double and quadruple that 

 sum, while in Kent the income of more than one had reached 



' Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield^ ch. i. 



2 The Neiv State of England, V&xt II. ch. xr. p. 226. 



