acting. The higher world, as it
looks from without, is a stage on which the actors walk their parts
much better than the spectators can. This play is played in every
district. Every rustic feels that his house is not like my lord's
house; his life like my lord's life; his wife like my lady. The climax
of the play is the Queen: nobody supposes that their house is like the
court; their life like her life; her orders like their orders. There is
in England a certain charmed spectacle which imposes on the many, and
guides their fancies as it will. As a rustic on coming to London finds
himself in presence of a great show and vast exhibition of
inconceivable mechanical things, so by the structure of our society, he
finds himself face to face with a great exhibition of political things
which he could not have imagined, which he could not make--to which he
feels in himself scarcely anything analogous.

Philosophers may deride this superstition, but its results are
inestimable. By the spectacle of this august society, countless
ignorant men and women are induced to obey the few nominal
electors--the Ll0 borough renters, and the L50 county renters--who have
nothing imposing about them, nothing which would attract the eye or
fascinate the fancy. What impresses men is not mind, but the result of
mind. And the greatest of these results is this wonderful spectacle of
society, which is ever new, and yet ever the same; in which accidents
pass and essence remains; in which one generation dies and another
succeeds, as if they were birds in a cage, or animals in a menagerie;
of which it seems almost more than a metaphor to treat the parts as
limbs of a perpetual living thing, so silently do they seem to change,
so wonderfully and so perfectly does the conspicuous life of the new
year take the place of the conspicuous life of last year. The apparent
rulers of the English nation are like the most imposing personages of a
splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they
whom the spectators cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second-rate
carriages; no one cares for them or asks about them, but they are
obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendour of those
who eclipsed and preceded them.

It is quite true that this imaginative sentiment is supported by a
sensation of political satisfaction. It cannot be said that the mass of
the English people are well off. There are whole classes who have not a
conce