the good old days of our race are passed away. We want money still as
much as ever we did; but we cannot go down from our castles with horse
and sword and waylay fat merchants--no, no, confounded new policemen
and the assize-courts prevent that. Younger brothers cannot be pages
to noble houses, as of old they were, serving gentle dames without
disgrace, handing my lord's rose-water to wash, or holding his stirrup
as he mounted for the chase. A page, forsooth! A pretty figure would
George Fitz-Boodle or any other man of fashion cut, in a jacket covered
with sugar-loafed buttons, and handing in penny-post notes on a silver
tray. The plebs have robbed us of THAT trade among others: nor, I
confess, do I much grudge them their trouvaille. Neither can we collect
together a few scores of free lances, like honest Hugh Calverly in the
Black Prince's time, or brave Harry Butler of Wallenstein's dragoons,
and serve this or that prince, Peter the Cruel or Henry of Trastamare,
Gustavus or the Emperor, at our leisure; or, in default of service,
fight and rob on our own gallant account, as the good gentlemen of old
did. Alas! no. In South America or Texas, perhaps, a man might have a
chance that way; but in the ancient world no man can fight except in the
king's service (and a mighty bad service that is too), and the lowest
European sovereign, were it Baldomero Espartero himself, would think
nothing of seizing the best-born condottiere that ever drew sword, and
shooting him down like the vulgarest deserter.

What, then, is to be done? We must discover fresh fields of
enterprise--of peaceable and commercial enterprise in a peaceful and
commercial age. I say, then, that the auctioneer's pulpit has never yet
been ascended by a scion of the aristocracy, and am prepared to prove
that they might scale it, and do so with dignity and profit.

For the auctioneer's pulpit is just the peculiar place where a man of
social refinement, of elegant wit, of polite perceptions, can bring
his wit, his eloquence, his taste, and his experience of life, most
delightfully into play. It is not like the bar, where the better and
higher qualities of a man of fashion find no room for exercise. In
defending John Jorrocks in an action of trespass, for cutting down a
stick in Sam Snooks's field, what powers of mind do you require?--powers
of mind, that is, which Mr. Serjeant Snorter, a butcher's son with a
great loud voice, a sizar at Cambridge, a wrangler, and s