And the snob of our day is quite a different person, more likely than not to be found hobnobbing with dukes and duchesses—­as irreproachable in dress and demeanour as Leech himself.  Thackeray discovered and christened him for us long ago; and he is related to most of us, and moves in the best society.  He has even ceased to brag of his intimacy with the great, they have become so commonplace to him; and if he swaggers at all, it is about his acquaintance with some popular actor or comic vocalist whom he is privileged to call by his christian-name.

And those splendid old grandees of high rank, so imposing of aspect, so crushing to us poor mortals by mere virtue not of their wealth and title alone, but of their high-bred distinction of feature and bearing—­to which Leech did such ample justice—­what has become of them?

They are like the snows of yester-year!  They have gone the way of their beautiful chariots with the elaborate armorial bearings and the tasselled hammercloth, the bewigged, cocked-hatted coachman, and the two gorgeous flunkies hanging on behind.  Sir Gorgeous Midas has beaten the dukes in mere gorgeousness, flunkies and all—­burlesqued the vulgar side of them, and unconsciously shamed it out of existence; made swagger and ostentation unpopular by his own evil example—­actually improved the manners of the great by sheer mimicry of their defects.  He has married his sons and his daughters to them and spoiled the noble curve of those lovely noses that Leech drew so well, and brought them down a peg in many ways, and given them a new lease of life; and he has enabled us to discover that they are not of such different clay from ourselves after all.  All the old slavish formulae of deference and respect—­“Your Grace,” “Your Ladyship,” “My Lord”—­that used to run so glibly off our tongues whenever we had a chance, are now left to servants and shopkeepers; and my slight experience of them, for one, is that they do not want to be toadied a bit, and that they are very polite, well-bred, and most agreeable people.

If we may judge of our modern aristocracy by that very slender fragment of our contemporary fiction, mostly American, that still thinks it worth writing about, our young noble of to-day is the most good-humoured, tolerant, simple-hearted, simple-minded, unsophisticated creature alive—­thinking nothing of his honours—­prostrate under the little foot of some fair Yankee, who is just as likely as not to jilt him for some transatlantic painter not yet known to fame.

Compare this unpretending youth to one of Bulwer’s heroes, or Disraeli’s, or even Thackeray’s!  And his simple old duke of a father and his dowdy old duchess of a mother are almost as devoid of swagger as himself; they seem to apologise for their very existence, if we may trust these American chroniclers who seem to know them so well; and I really think we no longer care to hear and read about them quite so much as we did—­unless it be in the society papers!