his central
point, while voices were lowered and chairs drawn closer. The nobles did
not hesitate to express their fear; the other party endeavoured to treat
the matter lightly. "Shame on the country," said Ryland, "to lay so much
stress upon words and frippery; it is a question of nothing; of the new
painting of carriage-pannels and the embroidery of footmen's coats."

Yet could England indeed doff her lordly trappings, and be content with the
democratic style of America? Were the pride of ancestry, the patrician
spirit, the gentle courtesies and refined pursuits, splendid attributes of
rank, to be erased among us? We were told that this would not be the case;
that we were by nature a poetical people, a nation easily duped by words,
ready to array clouds in splendour, and bestow honour on the dust. This
spirit we could never lose; and it was to diffuse this concentrated spirit
of birth, that the new law was to be brought forward. We were assured that,
when the name and title of Englishman was the sole patent of nobility, we
should all be noble; that when no man born under English sway, felt another
his superior in rank, courtesy and refinement would become the birth-right
of all our countrymen. Let not England be so far disgraced, as to have it
imagined that it can be without nobles, nature's true nobility, who bear
their patent in their mien, who are from their cradle elevated above the
rest of their species, because they are better than the rest. Among a race
of independent, and generous, and well educated men, in a country where the
imagination is empress of men's minds, there needs be no fear that we
should want a perpetual succession of the high-born and lordly. That party,
however, could hardly yet be considered a minority in the kingdom, who
extolled the ornament of the column, "the Corinthian capital of polished
society;" they appealed to prejudices without number, to old attachments
and young hopes; to the expectation of thousands who might one day become
peers; they set up as a scarecrow, the spectre of all that was sordid,
mechanic and base in the commercial republics.

The plague had come to Athens. Hundreds of English residents returned to
their own country. Raymond's beloved Athenians, the free, the noble people
of the divinest town in Greece, fell like ripe corn before the merciless
sickle of the adversary. Its pleasant places were deserted; its temples and
palaces were converted into tombs; its energies,