Commons was not composed of noblesse.  But, on the Continent, this was equivalent to saying, that the Commons were roturiers, bourgeois—­in fact, mechanic persons, of obscure families, occupied in the lowest employments of life.  Accordingly Salmasius wrote his whole work under the most serene conviction that the English House of Commons was tantamount to a Norwegian Storthing, viz. a gathering from the illiterate and labouring part of the nation.  This blunder was committed in perfect sincerity.  And there was no opening for light; because a continual sanction was given to this error by the aristocratic scorn which the cavaliers of ancient descent habitually applied to the prevailing party of the Roundheads; which may be seen to this hour in all the pasquinades upon Cromwell, though really in his own neighbourhood a “gentleman of worship.”  But for Salmasius it was a sufficient bar to any doubt arising, that if the House of Commons were not nobles, then were they not gentlemen—­since to be a gentleman and to be a titled man or noble, on the Continent, were convertible terms.  He himself was a man of titular rank, deriving his title from the territory of Saumaise; and in this needy scholar, behold a nobleman of France!  Milton, on the other hand, quite incapable of suspecting that Salmasius conceived himself to stand on a higher level than an English senator of the Commons, and never having his attention drawn to the chasm which universally divides foreign from English nobility, naturally interpreted all the invectives of Salmasius against the Lower House as directed against their principles and their conduct.  Thus arose an error, which its very enormity has hitherto screened from observation.

What, then, is this chasm dividing our nobility from that upon the Continent?  Latterly that point has begun to force itself upon the attention of the English themselves, as travellers by wholesale on the Continent.  The sagacious observers amongst them could not avoid to remark, that not unfrequently families were classed by scores amongst the nobility, who, in England, would not have been held to rank with the gentry.  Next, it must have struck them that, merely by their numbers, these continental orders of nobility could never have been designed for any thing higher than so many orders of gentry.  Finally, upon discovering that there was no such word or idea as that of gentry, expressing a secondary class distinct from a nobility, it flashed upon them that our important body of a landed gentry, bearing no titular honours of any kind, was inexpressible by any French, German, or Italian word; that upon the whole, and allowing for incommunicable differences, this order of gentry was represented on the Continent by the great mass of the “basse noblesse;” that our own great feudal nobility would be described on the Continent as a “haute noblesse;” and that amongst all these perplexities, it was inevitable