a government within
itself, capable of regulating the vast and often unruly multitude which
composed and attended it. This was the origin of the ancient court
called the _Green Cloth_,--composed of the marshal, treasurer, and other
great officers of the household, with certain clerks. The rich subjects
of the kingdom, who had formerly the same establishments, (only on a
reduced scale,) have since altered their economy, and turned the course
of their expense from the maintenance of vast establishments within
their walls to the employment of a great variety of independent trades
abroad. Their influence is lessened; but a mode of accommodation and a
style of splendor suited to the manners of the times has been increased.
Royalty itself has insensibly followed, and the royal household has been
carried away by the resistless tide of manners, but with this very
material difference: private men have got rid of the establishments
along with the reasons of them; whereas the royal household has lost all
that was stately and venerable in the antique manners, without
retrenching anything of the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment.
It is shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance and
personal accommodation; it has evaporated from the gross concrete into
an essence and rectified spirit of expense, where you have tuns of
ancient pomp in a vial of modern luxury.

But when the reason of old establishments is gone, it is absurd to
preserve nothing but the burden of them. This is superstitiously to
embalm a carcass not worth an ounce of the gums that are used to
preserve it. It is to burn precious oils in the tomb; it is to offer
meat and drink to the dead: not so much an honor to the deceased as a
disgrace to the survivors. Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls.
There the bleak winds, there "Boreas, and Eurus, and Caurus, and
Argestes loud," howling through the vacant lobbies, and clattering the
doors of deserted guardrooms, appall the imagination, and conjure up the
grim spectres of departed tyrants,--the Saxon, the Norman, and the
Dane,--the stern Edwards and fierce Henrys,--who stalk from desolation
to desolation, through the dreary vacuity and melancholy succession of
chill and comfortless chambers. When this tumult subsides, a dead and
still more frightful silence would reign in this desert, if every now
and then the tacking of hammers did not announce that those constant
attendants upon all courts in all ages, j