otland, is an
example of the consequences. Compared with the same class even in
England, the Scottish lower middle class is most visibly, to vary Mr.
Charles Sumner's phrase, _less_ well-bred, _less_ careful in personal
habits and in social conventions, _less_ refined. Let any one who doubts
it go, after issuing from the aristocratic solitudes which possess Loch
Lomond, let him go and observe the shopkeepers and the middle class in
Dumbarton, and Greenock, and Gourock, and the places along the mouth of
the Clyde. And for the poorest class, who that has seen it can ever
forget the hardly human horror, the abjection and uncivilizedness of
Glasgow?

What a strange religion, then, is our religion of inequality! Romance
often helps a religion to hold its ground, and romance is good in its
way; but ours is not even a romantic religion. No doubt our aristocracy
is an object of very strong public interest. The _Times_ itself bestows
a leading article by way of epithalamium on the Duke of Norfolk's
marriage. And those journals of a new type, full of talent, and which
interest me particularly because they seem as if they were written by
the young lion[485] of our youth,--the young lion grown mellow and, as
the French say, _viveur_, arrived at his full and ripe knowledge of the
world, and minded to enjoy the smooth evening of his days,--those
journals, in the main a sort of social gazette of the aristocracy, are
apparently not read by that class only which they most concern, but are
read with great avidity by other classes also. And the common people,
too, have undoubtedly, as Mr. Gladstone says, a wonderful preference for
a lord. Yet our aristocracy, from the action upon it of the Wars of the
Roses, the Tudors, and the political necessities of George the Third, is
for the imagination a singularly modern and uninteresting one. Its
splendor of station, its wealth, show, and luxury, is then what the
other classes really admire in it; and this is not an elevating
admiration. Such an admiration will never lift us out of our vulgarity
and brutality, if we chance to be vulgar and brutal to start with; it
will rather feed them and be fed by them. So that when Mr. Gladstone
invites us to call our love of inequality "the complement of the love of
freedom or its negative pole, or the shadow which the love of freedom
casts, or the reverberation of its voice in the halls of the
constitution," we must surely answer that all this mystical eloqu