The king’s household has not only several strong traces of this feudality, but it is formed also upon the principles of a body corporate:  it has its own magistrates, courts, and by-laws.  This might be necessary in the ancient times, in order to have a government within itself, capable of regulating the vast and often unruly multitude which composed and attended it.  This was the origin of the ancient court called the Green Cloth,—­composed of the marshal, treasurer, and other great officers of the household, with certain clerks.  The rich subjects of the kingdom, who had formerly the same establishments, (only on a reduced scale,) have since altered their economy, and turned the course of their expense from the maintenance of vast establishments within their walls to the employment of a great variety of independent trades abroad.  Their influence is lessened; but a mode of accommodation and a style of splendor suited to the manners of the times has been increased.  Royalty itself has insensibly followed, and the royal household has been carried away by the resistless tide of manners, but with this very material difference:  private men have got rid of the establishments along with the reasons of them; whereas the royal household has lost all that was stately and venerable in the antique manners, without retrenching anything of the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment.  It is shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance and personal accommodation; it has evaporated from the gross concrete into an essence and rectified spirit of expense, where you have tuns of ancient pomp in a vial of modern luxury.

But when the reason of old establishments is gone, it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burden of them.  This is superstitiously to embalm a carcass not worth an ounce of the gums that are used to preserve it.  It is to burn precious oils in the tomb; it is to offer meat and drink to the dead:  not so much an honor to the deceased as a disgrace to the survivors.  Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls.  There the bleak winds, there “Boreas, and Eurus, and Caurus, and Argestes loud,” howling through the vacant lobbies, and clattering the doors of deserted guardrooms, appall the imagination, and conjure up the grim spectres of departed tyrants,—­the Saxon, the Norman, and the Dane,—­the stern Edwards and fierce Henrys,—­who stalk from desolation to desolation, through the dreary vacuity and melancholy succession of chill and comfortless chambers.  When this tumult subsides, a dead and still more frightful silence would reign in this desert, if every now and then the tacking of hammers did not announce that those constant attendants upon all courts in all ages, jobs, were still alive,—­for whose sake alone it is that any trace of ancient grandeur is suffered to remain.  These palaces are a true emblem of some governments:  the inhabitants are decayed, but the governors and magistrates still flourish.  They put me in mind of Old Sarum, where the representatives, more in number than the constituents, only serve to inform us that this was once a place of trade, and sounding with “the busy hum of men,” though now you can only trace the streets by the color of the corn, and its sole manufacture is in members of Parliament.