The houses hint of these things.  If you have seen the best old brick mansions of New England, and will imagine them more beautifully proportioned, set off by balancing wings and having infinitely finer details as to doorways, windows, porticos, and also as to wood carvings and fixtures within—­as, for instance, the beautiful silver latches and hinges of the Chase house at Annapolis—­you will gather something of the flavor of these old Southern homes.  For though such venerable mansions as the Chase, Paca, Brice, Hammond, Ridout, and Bordley houses, in Annapolis, are not without family resemblance to the best New England colonial houses, the resemblance is of a kind to emphasize the differences, not only between the mansions of the North and South, but between the builders of them.  The contrast is subtle, but marked.

Your New England house, beautiful as it is, is stamped with austere simplicity.  The man who built it was probably a scholar but he was almost certainly a Calvinist.  He habited himself in black and was served by serving maids, instead of slaves in livery.  If a woman was not flat-chested and forlorn, he was prone to regard her as the devil masquerading for the downfall of man—­and no doubt with some justice, too.  Night and morning he presided at family prayers, the purpose of which was to impress upon his family and servants that to have a good time was wicked, and that to be gay in this life meant hell-fire and damnation in the next.

Upon this pious person his cousin of Annapolis looked with something not unlike contempt; for the latter, though he too was a scholar, possessed the sort of scholarliness which takes into account beauty and the lore of cosmopolitanism.  He may have been religious or he may not have been, but if religious he demanded something handsome, something stylish, in his religion, as he did also in his residence, in his wife, his sons, his daughters, his horses, coaches, dinners, wines, and slaves.  He did things with a flourish, and was not beset by a perpetual consciousness and fear of hell.  He approved of pretty women; he made love to them; he married them; he was the father of them.  His pretty daughters married men who also admired pretty women, and became the mothers of other pretty women, who became, in turn, the mothers and grandmothers of the pretty women of the South to-day.

Your old-time Annapolis gentleman’s ideas of a republic were far indeed from those now current, for he understood perfectly the difference between a republic and a democracy—­a difference which is not now so well understood.  He believed that the people should elect the heads of the government, but he also believed that these heads should be elected from his own class, and that, having voted, the people should go about their business, trusting their betters to run the country as it should be run.

This, at least, is my picture of the old aristocrats of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, as conveyed to me by what I have seen of their houses and possessions and what I have read of their mode of life.  They were the early princes of the Republic and by all odds its most picturesque figures.