Let us return to their merits.  For the power of manners an aristocratic class, whether materialized or not, will always, from its circumstances, have a strong sense.  And although for this power of social life and manners, so important to civilization, our English race has no special natural turn, in our aristocracy this power emerges and marks them.  When the day of general humanization comes, they will have fixed the standard of manners.  The English simplicity, too, makes the best of the English aristocracy more frank and natural than the best of the like class anywhere else, and even the worst of them it makes free from the incredible fatuities and absurdities of the worst.  Then the sense of conduct they share with their countrymen at large.  In no class has it such trials to undergo; in none is it more often and more grievously overborne.  But really the right comment on this is the comment of Pepys[484] upon the evil courses of Charles the Second and the Duke of York and the court of that day:  “At all which I am sorry; but it is the effect of idleness, and having nothing else to employ their great spirits upon.”

Heaven forbid that I should speak in dispraise of that unique and most English class which Mr. Charles Sumner extols—­the large class of gentlemen, not of the landed class or of the nobility, but cultivated and refined.  They are a seemly product of the energy and of the power to rise in our race.  Without, in general, rank and splendor and wealth and luxury to polish them, they have made their own the high standard of life and manners of an aristocratic and refined class.  Not having all the dissipations and distractions of this class, they are much more seriously alive to the power of intellect and knowledge, to the power of beauty.  The sense of conduct, too, meets with fewer trials in this class.  To some extent, however, their contiguousness to the aristocratic class has now the effect of materializing them, as it does the class of newly enriched people.  The most palpable action is on the young amongst them, and on their standard of life and enjoyment.  But in general, for this whole class, established facts, the materialism which they see regnant, too much block their mental horizon, and limit the possibilities of things to them.  They are deficient in openness and flexibility of mind, in free play of ideas, in faith and ardor.  Civilized they are, but they are not much of a civilizing force; they are somehow bounded and ineffective.

So on the middle class they produce singularly little effect.  What the middle class sees is that splendid piece of materialism, the aristocratic class, with a wealth and luxury utterly out of their reach, with a standard of social life and manners, the offspring of that wealth and luxury, seeming utterly out of their reach also.  And thus they are thrown back upon themselves—­upon a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners.