ent towns of
Flanders, the Manchesters and Liverpools of the fifteenth century. He
had visited Florence, recently adorned by the magnificence of Lorenzo,
and Venice, not yet bumbled by the Confederates of Cambray. This eminent
man deliberately pronounced England to be the best governed country of
which he had any knowledge. Her constitution he emphatically designated
as a just and holy thing, which, while it protected the people, really
strengthened the hands of a prince who respected it. In no other country
were men so effectually secured from wrong. The calamities produced by
our intestine wars seemed to him to be confined to the nobles and the
fighting men, and to leave no traces such as he had been accustomed to
see elsewhere, no ruined dwellings, no depopulated cities.

It was not only by the efficiency of the restraints imposed on the royal
prerogative that England was advantageously distinguished from most of
the neighbouring countries. A: peculiarity equally important, though
less noticed, was the relation in which the nobility stood here to the
commonalty. There was a strong hereditary aristocracy: but it was of all
hereditary aristocracies the least insolent and exclusive. It had none
of the invidious character of a caste. It was constantly receiving
members from the people, and constantly sending down members to mingle
with the people. Any gentleman might become a peer. The younger son of a
peer was but a gentleman. Grandsons of peers yielded precedence to newly
made knights. The dignity of knighthood was not beyond the reach of
any man who could by diligence and thrift realise a good estate, or
who could attract notice by his valour in a battle or a siege. It was
regarded as no disparagement for the daughter of a Duke, nay of a royal
Duke, to espouse a distinguished commoner. Thus, Sir John Howard married
the daughter of Thomas Mowbray Duke of Norfolk. Sir Richard Pole married
the Countess of Salisbury, daughter of George, Duke of Clarence. Good
blood was indeed held in high respect: but between good blood and the
privileges of peerage there was, most fortunately for our country, no
necessary connection. Pedigrees as long, and scutcheons as old, were to
be found out of the House of Lords as in it. There were new men who bore
the highest titles. There were untitled men well known to be descended
from knights who had broken the Saxon ranks at Hastings, and scaled the
walls of Jerusalem. There were Bohuns, Mowbr