6 



Let me guard myself agaiu. In England and elsewhere 

 there are royal and aristocratic estates, decimated continually 

 by death ; and lower classes, so called, of coarse, and stern 

 and rough-hewn humanity, from whose sounder timber the 

 losses of the other are constantly repaired. This, too, may 

 not indicate dishonor, yet I would not thus rate the unincor- 

 porate guild of whom I am speaking. In their case the no- 

 bility is rather with them, while it is still obvious that theirs 

 is much the same relationship to the soil, as that which per- 

 tains to their humbler and foreign prototypes. It is not from 

 our tillers of fields and feeders of herds that any higher rank 

 is to be recruited. They have their own nobility. They have 

 brought their race to its own sceptre, and like Napoleon, 

 commenced a dynasty for themselves. Here and there are 

 seen the shining memorials of their canonized great — of Choate 

 and Tudor by the seashore, of Newell by his own broad river, 

 and of Newhall by his little brook, of Pickering in the halls 

 of the nation, and of others, brilliant in church, state and 

 profession, dotting the county with spangles of eminence. 

 No doubt the farmers of England may be vigorous and apt 

 enough to move toward a better civil liberty ; but the farmers 

 of Essex were never less than noble, and that without wait- 

 ing for decree of Garter-King at arms, or patent from the 

 Crown. I speak not of banquctings nor liveries, of servants' 

 halls nor trappings heraldic ; but of that nobility that enables 

 the citizen to meet the monarch with calmness, and makes him 

 to be ready furnished for his place in the nation's highest 

 councils, whenever her call shall reach him. In the homes 

 of such have always lain familiar to every hand and eye, the 

 Bible and the Dictionary, the muse of Goldsmith and the 

 profundity of Locke, the searching words of Jeremy Taylor 



