The State, the power most representing the right reason of the nation, and most worthy, therefore, of ruling,—­of exercising, when circumstances require it, authority over us all,—­is for Mr. Carlyle the aristocracy.  For Mr. Lowe, it is the middle-class with its incomparable Parliament.  For the Reform League, it is the working-class, with its “brightest powers of sympathy and readiest powers of action.”  Now, culture, with its disinterested pursuit of perfection, culture, simply trying to see things as they are, in order to seize on the best and to make it prevail, is surely well fitted to help us to judge rightly, by all the aids of observing, reading, and thinking, the qualifications and titles to our confidence of these three candidates for authority, and can thus render us a practical service of no mean value.

So when Mr. Carlyle, a man of genius to whom we have all at one time or other been indebted for refreshment and stimulus, says we should give rule to the aristocracy, mainly because of its dignity and politeness, surely culture is useful in reminding us, [69] that in our idea of perfection the characters of beauty and intelligence are both of them present, and sweetness and light, the two noblest of things, are united.  Allowing, therefore, with Mr. Carlyle, the aristocratic class to possess sweetness, culture insists on the necessity of light also, and shows us that aristocracies, being by the very nature of things inaccessible to ideas, unapt to see how the world is going, must be somewhat wanting in light, and must therefore be, at a moment when light is our great requisite, inadequate to our needs.  Aristocracies, those children of the established fact, are for epochs of concentration.  In epochs of expansion, epochs such as that in which we now live, epochs when always the warning voice is again heard:  Now is the judgment of this world—­in such epochs aristocracies, with their natural clinging to the established fact, their want of sense for the flux of things, for the inevitable transitoriness of all human institutions, are bewildered and helpless.  Their serenity, their high spirit, their power of haughty resistance,—­the great qualities of an aristocracy, and the secret of its distinguished manners and dignity,—­these very qualities, in an epoch of [70] expansion, turn against their possessors.  Again and again I have said how the refinement of an aristocracy may be precious and educative to a raw nation as a kind of shadow of true refinement; how its serenity and dignified freedom from petty cares may serve as a useful foil to set off the vulgarity and hideousness of that type of life which a hard middle-class tends to establish, and to help people to see this vulgarity and hideousness in their true colours.  From such an ignoble spectacle as that of poor Mrs. Lincoln,—­a spectacle to vulgarise a whole nation,—­aristocracies undoubtedly preserve us.  But the true grace and serenity is that of which Greece and Greek art suggest