Modern Europe_ states in his preface to that immortal work
that his object in adopting the form of a Series of Letters from a
Nobleman to his Son is "to give more Weight to the Moral and Political
Maxims, and to entitle the author to offer, without seeming to dictate
to the World, such reflections on Life and Manners as are supposed more
immediately to belong to the higher orders in Society." Nor were the
privileges of rank held to pertain merely to temporal concerns. When
Selina Countess of Huntingdon asked the Duchess of Buckingham to
accompany her to a sermon of Whitefield's, the Duchess replied: "I thank
your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers;
their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with
impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually
endeavouring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is
monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches
that crawl on the earth; and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship
should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good
breeding."

The exclusive and almost feudal character of the English peerage was
destroyed, finally and of set purpose, by Pitt when he declared that
every man who had an estate of ten thousand a year had a right to be a
peer. In Lord Beaconsfield's words, "He created a plebeian aristocracy
and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of
second-rate squires and fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of
Lombard Street, and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill."
This democratization of the peerage was accompanied by great
modifications of pomp and stateliness in the daily life of the peers. In
the eighteenth century the Duke and Duchess of Atholl were always served
at their own table before their guests, in recognition of their royal
rank as Sovereigns of the Isle of Man; and the Duke and Duchess of
Argyll observed the same courteous usage for no better reason than
because they liked it. The "Household Book" of Alnwick Castle records
the amplitude and complexity of the domestic hierarchy which ministered
to the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland; and at Arundel and Belvoir,
and Trentham and Wentworth, the magnates of the peerage lived in a state
little less than regal. Seneschals and gentlemen-ushers,
ladies-in-waiting and pages-of-the-presence adorned noble as well as
royal households. The private chaplain o