nd hair-powder survived only in the footmen's liveries.
When the Reform Bill of 1832 received the Royal Assent, the Lord
Bathurst of the period, who had been a member of the Duke of
Wellington's Cabinet, solemnly cut off his pigtail, saying, "Ichabod,
for the glory is departed;" and to the first Reformed Parliament only
one pigtail was returned (it pertained to Mr. Sheppard, M.P. for
Frome)--an impressive symbol of social transformation.

The lines of demarcation between the peerage and the untitled classes
were partially obliterated. How clear and rigid those lines had been it
is difficult for us to conceive. In _Humphrey Clinker_ the nobleman
refuses to fight a duel with the squire on the ground of their social
inequality. Mr. Wilberforce declined a peerage because it would exclude
his sons from intimacy with private gentlemen, clergymen, and mercantile
families. I have stated in a previous chapter that Lord Bathurst, who
was born in 1791, told me that at his private school he and the other
sons of peers sate together on a privileged bench apart from the rest of
the boys. A typical aristocrat was the first Marquis of Abercorn. He
died in 1818, but he is still revered in Ulster under the name of "The
Owld Marquis." This admirable nobleman always went out shooting in his
Blue Ribbon, and required his housemaids to wear white kid gloves when
they made his bed. Before he married his first cousin, Miss Cecil
Hamilton, he induced the Crown to confer on her the titular rank of an
Earl's daughter, that he might not marry beneath his position; and when
he discovered that she contemplated eloping, he sent a message begging
her to take the family coach, as it ought never to be said that Lady
Abercorn left her husband's roof in a hack chaise. By such endearing
traits do the truly great live in the hearts of posterity.

In the earlier part of this century Dr. Arnold inveighed with
characteristic vigour against "the insolencies of our aristocracy, the
scandalous exemption of the peers from all ignominious punishments short
of death, and the insolent practice of allowing peers to vote in
criminal trials on their honour, while other men vote on their oath."
But generally the claims of rank and birth were admitted with a
childlike cheerfulness. The high function of government was the
birthright of the few. The people, according to episcopal showing, had
nothing to do with the laws but to obey them. The ingenious author of
_Russell's