BоTH 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 he retic 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 bar. vest 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 ob

servation 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,* 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.

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 ag gression, 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 heen 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 same 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 exists, 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 them 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 infan. try 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 power ful 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. populace in both countries, though miserably deteriorated by the long defect of an aristocracy whom they could

The

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

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?* 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" lo 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.

The English aristocracy furnished a question for drawing all these large varieties of ignorance to a focus. In coming upon the ground of Eog. lish institutions, Salmasius necessarily began" verba nostra conari,"

But,

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 an. tithetically opposed to the Lords, it followed that the House of Commons was not composed of noblesse. 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 illi terate and labouring part of the nation. This blunder was committed in per fect sincerity. And there was no opening for light; because a conti nual 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 realty in his own neighbourhood a "gentleman of worship." But for Salmasius it was a