sh aristocracy in the middle of the
eighteenth century. Yet at no period of our national history--unless,
perhaps, during the orgies of the Restoration were aristocratic morals
at so low an ebb. Edmund Burke, in a passage which is as ethically
questionable as it is rhetorically beautiful, taught that vice loses
half its evil when it loses all its grossness. But in the English
society of his time grossness was as conspicuous as vice itself, and it
infected not only the region of morals, but also that of manners.

Sir Walter Scott has described how, in his youth, refined gentlewomen
read aloud to their families the most startling passages of the most
outrageous authors. I have been told by one who heard it from an
eye-witness that a great Whig duchess, who figures brilliantly in the
social and political memoirs of the eighteenth century, turning to the
footman who was waiting on her at dinner, exclaimed, "I wish to G---
that you wouldn't keep rubbing your great greasy belly against the back
of my chair." Men and women of the highest fashion swore like troopers;
the Princes of the Blood, who carried down into the middle of the
nineteenth century the courtly habits of their youth, setting the
example. Mr. Gladstone told me the following anecdote, which he had from
the Lord Pembroke of the period, who was present at the scene.

In the early days of the first Reformed Parliament the Whig Government
were contemplating a reform of the law of Church Rates. Success was
certain in the House of Commons, but the Tory peers, headed by the Duke
of Cumberland, determined to defeat the Bill in the House of Lords. A
meeting of the party was held, when it appeared that, in the balanced
state of parties, the Tory peers could not effect their purpose unless
they could rally the bishops to their aid. The question was, What would
the Archbishop of Canterbury do? He was Dr. Howley, the mildest and most
apostolic of men, and the most averse from strife and contention. It was
impossible to be certain of his action, and the Duke of Cumberland
posted off to Lambeth to ascertain it. Returning in hot haste to the
caucus, he burst into the room, exclaiming, "It's all right, my lords;
the Archbishop says he will be d----d to hell if he doesn't throw the
Bill out." The Duke of Wellington's "Twopenny d----n" has become
proverbial; and Sydney Smith neatly rebuked a similar propensity in Lord
Melbourne by saying, "Let us assume everybody and everything to