n. The younger sons of noblemen do not despise a business career.
Lord Townsend, a Minister of State, has a brother who is content to be a
city merchant. When Lord Oxford governed England, his younger son was a
commercial agent at Aleppo, whence he refused to return, and where some
years ago he died.

This custom, which is unfortunately dying out, would seem monstrous to
German grandees with quarterings on the brain. In Germany they are all
princes; they cannot conceive that the son of a Peer of England would
lower himself to be a rich and powerful citizen. There have been in
Germany nearly thirty highnesses of the same name, not one of them with
a scrap of property beyond his coat of arms and his pride.

In France, anybody who likes may be a marquis, and whosoever arrives
from the corner of some province, with money to spend and a name ending
with Ac or Ille, may say, "a man such as I, a man of my quality," and
may show sovereign contempt for a mere merchant. The merchant so often
hears his occupation spoken of with disdain that he is fool enough to
blush for it. Yet I cannot tell which is the more valuable to the
State--a well-powdered lordling, who knows precisely at what hour the
king rises, and at what hour he goes to bed, and who assumes airs of
loftiness when playing the slave in a minister's ante-chamber; or a
merchant who enriches his country, issues from his office orders to
Surat and Cairo, and contributes to the happiness of the world.

_V.--Tragedy and Comedy_

The drama of England, like that of Spain, was fully grown when the
French drama was in a state of childishness. Shakespeare, who is
accounted to be the English Corneille, flourished at about the same time
as Lope de Vega; and it was Shakespeare who created the English drama.
He possessed a fertile and powerful genius, that had within its scope
both the normal and the sublime; but he ignored rules entirely, and had
not the smallest spark of good taste. It is a risky thing to say, but
true nevertheless--this author has ruined the English drama. In these
monstrous farces of his, called tragedies, there are scenes so
beautiful, fragments so impressive and terrible, that the pieces have
always been played with immense success. Time, which alone makes the
reputation of men, ultimately condones their defects. Most of the
fantastic and colossal creations of this author have with the lapse of
two centuries established a claim to be considered sublime; mo