Meantime the confusion, which is inveterate upon this subject, arose out of the incompatible grounds upon which the aristocracies of England and the Continent had formed themselves.  For the continental there seemed to exist no exclusive privilege, and yet there was one.  For the English there existed practically a real privilege, and yet in law there was none.  On the Continent, no titled order had ever arisen without peculiar immunities and powers, extending oftentimes to criminal jurisdictions; but yet, by that same error which has so often vitiated a paper currency, the whole order, in spite of its unfair privileges, was generally depreciated.  This has been the capital blunder of France at all times.  Her old aristocracy was so numerous, that every provincial town was inundated with “comptes,” &c.; and no villager even turned to look on hearing another addressed by a title.  The other day we saw a return from the Legion of Honour:  “Such in these moments, as in all the past,” France, it appeared, had already indorsed upon this suspicious roll not fewer than forty-nine thousand six hundred and odd beneficiaries.  Let the reader think of forty-nine thousand six hundred Knights of the Bath turned loose upon London.  Now ex adverso England must have some virtual and operative privilege for her nobility, or else how comes it, that in any one of our largest provincial towns—­towns so populous as to have but four rivals on the Continent—­a stranger saluted seriously by the title of “my lord,” will very soon have a mob at his heels?  Is it that the English nobility can dispense with immunities from taxation, with legal supremacies, and with the sword of justice; in short, with all artificial privileges, having these two authentic privileges from nature—­stern limitation of their numbers, and a prodigious share in the most durable of the national property?  Vainly does the continental noble flourish against such omnipotent charters the rusty keys of his dungeon, or the sculptured image of his family gallows.  Power beyond the law is not nobility, is not antiquity.  Tax-gatherers, from the two last centuries, have been the founders of most titled houses in France; and the prestige of antiquity is, therefore, but rarely present.  But were it otherwise, and that a “noblesse” could plead one uniform descent from crusaders, still, if they were a hundred thousand strong—­and, secondly, had no property—­and, thirdly, comprehended in their lists a mere gentry, having generally no pretensions at all to ancient or illustrious descent, they would be—­nothing.  And exactly on that basis reposes the difference between the Continent and England.  Eternally the ridiculous pretence of being “noble” by family, seems to claim for obscure foreigners some sort of advantage over the plain untitled Englishman; but eternally the travelled Englishman recollects, that, so far as this equivocal “nobility” had been really fenced with privileges, those have been long in a course of superannuation; whilst the counter-vailing advantages for his own native aristocracy are precisely those which time or political revolutions never can superannuate.