resting on aristocratic oars or “sculls,” that were not to be too vulgarly handled.  There was a feeling impressed on you, that eight-hundred years of descent and ten thousand a-year in landed income did not trouble themselves with the trifling things that gave distinction to lesser people—­such as literature, fine arts, politics, and general knowledge.  These were very well for those who had nothing else to pride themselves on, but for the Rockvilles—­oh! certainly they were by no means requisite.

In fact, you found yourself, with a little variation, in the predicament of Cowper’s people,

                      —­who spent their lives
  In dropping buckets into empty wells,
  And growing tired of drawing nothing up.

Who hasn’t often come across these “dry wells” of society; solemn gulfs out of which you can pump nothing up?  You know them; they are at your elbow every day in large and brilliant companies, and defy the best sucking-buckets ever invented to extract anything from them.  But the Rockvilles were each and all of this adust description.  It was a family feature, and they seemed, if either, rather proud of it.  They must be so; for proud they were, amazingly proud; and they had nothing besides to be proud of, except their acres, and their ancestors.

But the fact was, they could not help it.  It was become organic.  They had acted the justice of peace, maintained the constitution against upstarts and manufacturers, signed warrants, supported the church and the house of correction, committed poachers, and then rested on the dignity of their ancestors for so many generations, that their skulls, brains, constitutions, and nervous systems, were all so completely moulded into that shape and baked into that mould, that a Rockville would be a Rockville to the end of time, if God and Nature would have allowed it.  But such things wear out.  The American Indians and the Australian nations wear out; they are not progressive, and as Nature abhors a vacuum, she does not forget the vacuum wherever it may be, whether in a hot desert, or in a cold and stately Rockville;—­a very ancient, honorable, and substantial family that lies fallow till the thinking faculty literally dies out.

For several generations there had been symptoms of decay about the Rockville family.  Not in its property, that was as large as ever; not in their personal stature and physical aspect.  The Rockvilles continued, as they always had been, a tall and not bad-looking family.  But they grew gradually less prolific.  For a hundred and fifty years past there had seldom been more than two, or at most three, children.  There had generally been an heir to the estate, and another to the family pulpit, and sometimes a daughter married to some neighboring squire.  But Sir Roger’s father had been an only child, and Sir Roger himself was an only child.  The danger of extinction to the family, apparent as it was, had never induced Sir Roger to marry.  At the time that we are turning our attention upon him, he had reached the mature age of sixty.  Nobody believed that Sir Roger now would marry; he was the last, and likely to be, of his line.