Both the nobility and gentry of this country stand upon a basis so entirely peculiar, that, were it for that cause only, we could not greatly wonder at the perverse misconstructions upon these institutions so prevalent abroad.  Indeed the peculiarity of our aristocracy is so effectual for obscurity, that we also, as a nation, are ignorant upon much which marks it characteristically; our own ignorance partly explains, and partly has caused, the continental ignorance.  Could it, indeed, be expected that any people should be sensible of their own peculiarities as peculiarities?  Of all men, for instance, a Persian would be the last man from whom we could reasonably look for an account of Persia; because those habits of Persians as Orientals, as Mussulmans, and as heretic Mussulmans, which would chiefly fix the attention of Europeans, must be unexciting to the mind of a native.

And universally we know that, in every community, the features which would most challenge attention from a stranger, have been those which the natives systematically have neglected.  If, but for two days’ residence, it were possible that a modern European could be carried back to Rome and Roman society, what a harvest of interesting facts would he reap as to the habits of social intercourse!  Yet these are neglected by Roman writers, as phenomena too familiar, which there was no motive for noticing.  Why should a man notice as a singularity what every man witnesses daily as an experience?  A satirist, like Juvenal, is obliged, indeed, to notice particular excesses:  but this is done obliquely, and so far only as to identify the case he means; besides that often they are caricatured.  Or an antiquarian observer, like Athenaeus, finds, after ten centuries of social life amongst the same race, a field of observation in the present, which he sees as contrasted with the past which he reads of.  It is in that way only that we English know any thing of our own past habits.  Some of these are brought forward indirectly in the evidence upon judicial trials—­some in dramatic scenes; and, as happened in the case of Athenaeus, we see English historians, at periods of great conscious revolution, (Holinshed, for instance,[5] whose youth had passed in the church reformation,) exerting themselves to recover, through old men’s recollections, traditions of a social life which they felt to be passing away for ever.  Except, however, in these two cases, the one indirect, the other by accident, coinciding with an epoch of great importance, we find little in the way of description, or philosophic examination, toward any sustained record of English civilization as intermitting from one era to another, and periodically resumed.  The same truth holds good of civilization on the Continent, and for the same reason, viz. that no nation describes itself, or can do so.  To see an object you must not stand in its centre; your own station must be external.  The eye cannot see itself, nor a mechanic force measure itself, as if it were its own resistance.