centuries, not to perceive, if he be wise, that the aristocracy therein
depicted was ripe for ruin--yea, already ruined--under any form of
government whatsoever, independent of all political changes. Indeed,
many of the political changes were not the causes but the effects of the
demoralisation of the noblesse. Historians will tell you how, as early
as the beginning of the seventeenth century, Henry IV. complained that
the nobles were quitting their country districts; how succeeding kings
and statesmen, notably Richelieu and Louis XIV., tempted the noblesse up
to Paris, that they might become mere courtiers, instead of powerful
country gentlemen; how those who remained behind were only the poor
_hobereaux_, little hobby-hawks among the gentry, who considered it
degradation to help in governing the parish, as their forefathers had
governed it, and lived shabbily in their chateaux, grinding the last
farthing out of their tenants, that they might spend it in town during
the winter. No wonder that with such an aristocracy, who had renounced
that very duty of governing the country, for which alone they and their
forefathers had existed, there arose government by intendants and sub-
delegates, and all the other evils of administrative centralisation,
which M. de Tocqueville anatomises and deplores. But what was the cause
of the curse? Their moral degradation. What drew them up to Paris save
vanity and profligacy? What kept them from intermarrying with the middle
class save pride? What made them give up the office of governors save
idleness? And if vanity, profligacy, pride, and idleness be not
injustices and moral vices, what are?

The race of heroic knights and nobles who fought under the walls of
Jerusalem--who wrestled, and not in vain, for centuries with the equally
heroic English, in defence of their native soil--who had set to all
Europe the example of all knightly virtues, had rotted down to this;
their only virtue left, as Mr. Carlyle says, being--a perfect readiness