[Footnote 5:  An introduction, prefixed to Holinshed, descriptive of domestic life amongst the English, as it may be presumed to have existed for the century before, (1450-1550,) was written (according to our recollection) by Harrison.  Almost a century earlier, we have Chief Justice Fortescue’s account of the French peasantry, a record per antiphrasin of the English.  About the great era of 1688, we have the sketch of contemporary English civilization by Chamberlayne.  So rare and distant are the glimpses which we obtain of ourselves at different periods.]

It is easy, therefore, to understand why, amongst the writers of any given nation, we are least entitled to look for an account of the habits or separate institutions distinguishing that nation:  since the stimulation of difference least of all exists for those who never see that difference broadly relieved in adverse habits or institutions.  To such nation its own aristocracy, like its own climate, seems a positive fact, neither good nor bad, and worthy of little notice, as apparently open to little improvement.  And yet to each nation its own aristocracy is often the arbitrating cause, but always the exponent or index of its future political welfare.  Laws are important; administration of laws is important; to be Protestant or Popish is important; and so of many other agencies:  but, as was said by Harrington in his Oceana, there is something in the original idea and in the executive composition of a gentry which cannot be created artificially, and (if wanting) cannot be supplied by substitution.  Upon the quality of an aristocracy in critical periods, in those periods when the national stability is menaced by revolution, or the national independence by aggression, depends the national salvation.  Let us lay before the reader an illustration.

It is our deliberate conviction, that, from the foundations of civil society, human annals present no second case of infamy equal to that which is presented by the condition of Spain and Portugal from the year 1807 up to our own immediate era.  It is a case the more interesting, because two opposite verdicts have been pronounced upon it by men of the greatest ability amongst ourselves.  Some, as the present and the late Laureate, have found in the Peninsular struggle with Napoleon, the very perfection of popular grandeur; others, agreeing with ourselves, have seen in this pretended struggle nothing but the last extravagance of thrasonic and impotent national arrogance.  Language more frantically inflated, and deeds more farcically abject, surely were never before united.  It seems therefore strange, that a difference, even thus far, should exist between Englishmen standing upon the same facts, starting from the sane principles.  But perhaps, as regards Mr Wordsworth, he did not allow enough for the long series of noxious influences under which Spain had suffered.  And this, at any rate, is notorious—­he spoke of the