DECLINE OF CEREMONIAL INFLUENCE. 89 



names which confess inferiority and submission ; is the sama 

 feeling which resists despotic power and inaugurates popu- 

 lar government, denies the authority of the Church and 

 establishes the right of private judgment. 



A fourth fact, akin to the foregoing, is, that these sev« 

 eral kinds of government not only decline together, but 

 corrupt together. By the same process that a Court of 

 Chancery becomes a place not for the administration of 

 justice, but for the withholding of it — by the same process 

 that a national church, from being an agency for moral con- 

 trol, comes to be merely a thing of formulas and tithes and 

 bishoprics — ^by this same process do titles and ceremonies 

 that once had a meaning and a power become empty forijis. 

 Coats of arms which served to distinguish men in bat- 

 tle, now figure on the carriage panels of retired grocers. 

 Once a badge of high military rank, the shoulder-knot has 

 become, on the modern footman, a mark of servitude. 

 The name Banneret, which once marked a partially-created 

 Baron — a Baron who had passed his military " little go " — 

 is now, under the modification of Baronet, applicable to 

 any one favoured by wealth or interest or party feeling. 

 Knighthood has so far ceased to be an honour, that men 

 now honour themselves by declining it. The military dig- 

 nity JEscuyer has, in the modern Esquire, become a wholly 

 unmilitary affix. Not only do titles, and phrases, and sa- 

 lutes cease to fulfil their original functions, but the whole 

 apparatus of social forms tends to become useless for its 

 original purpose — the facilitation of social intercourse. 

 Those most learned in ceremonies, and most precise in the 

 observance of them, are not always the best behaved ; as 

 those deepest read in creeds and scriptures are not there- 

 fore the most religious ; nor those who have the clearest 

 notions of legality and illegality, the most honest. Just 

 as lawyers are of all men the least noted for probity ; aa 

 cathedral towns have a lower moral charactei than most 



