Lord Kinsale’s right of wearing his hat in the royal presence—­reckon off the petty discount for privileges so purely ceremonial, and absolute nothing remains to distinguish the nobility.  For as to the practice of entails, the legal benefit of primogeniture, &c., these have no more essential connexion with the nobility, than the possession of land or manorial rights.  They are privileges attached to a known situation, which is open equally to every man not disqualified as an alien.  Consequently, we infer that, the fusion and continuity of our ranks being perfect, it is not possible to suppose, with respect to a great patriotic interest, any abrupt pause in the fluent circulation of our national sympathies.  We, therefore, cannot be supposed to arrogate for the nobility any separate privilege of patriotism.  But still we venture to affirm, that, if the total numbers of our nobility and their nearest connexions were summed; and if from that sum were subtracted all officers, being brothers, sons, nephews, of British peers, who laid down their lives, or suffered incurable wounds in the naval or military service of their country, the proportion will be found greater than that upon the aggregate remainder belonging to the rest of the nation.  Life is the same blessing for all ranks alike.  But certainly, though for all it is intrinsically the same priceless jewel, there is in the setting of this jewel something more radiantly brilliant to him who inherits a place amongst the British nobility, than to him whose prospects have been clouded originally by the doubts and fears of poverty.  And, at all events, the libation of blood in the course of the last war was, we must repeat, on the part of the high aristocracy, disproportionately large.

In that proportion are those men unprincipled who speak of the English nobility as an indolent class—­detached from public employments, and taking neither share nor interest in the public service.  Such representations, where they are not deliberate falsehoods, point to a fact which is not uncommon; from the limited number of our nobility, and consequently the rare opportunities for really studying their habits, it is easy to see that in sketches of this order, (whether libellous amongst mob-orators, or serious in novels,) the pretended portrait has been founded on a vague romantic abstraction of what may be supposed peculiar to the condition of a patrician order under all political circumstances.  Haughtiness, exclusiveness, indolence, and luxury, compose the romantic type which the delineator figures to his mind; and at length it becomes evident to any man, who has an experimental knowledge of this order, that probably the ancient Persian satraps, or the omrahs of Hindostan, have much more truly been operatively present to the describers than any thing ancient or modern amongst the realities of England.  A candid person, who wishes to estimate the true, and not the imaginary nobles of England, will perceive one fact