never scrupled to evince a distaste to the change in society which was
slowly converting an agricultural into a trading population.

It may be observed, too, that a middle class as rarely unites itself
with the idols of the populace as with the chiefs of a seignorie.
The brute attachment of the peasants and the mobs to the gorgeous and
lavish earl seemed to the burgesses the sign of a barbaric clanship,
opposed to that advance in civilization towards which they half
unconsciously struggled.

And here we must rapidly glance at what, as far as a statesman may
foresee, would have been the probable result of Warwick's ascendancy,
if durable and effectual. If attached, by prejudice and birth, to the
aristocracy, he was yet by reputation and habit attached also to the
popular party,--that party more popular than the middle class,--the
majority, the masses. His whole life had been one struggle against
despotism in the crown. Though far from entertaining such schemes as
in similar circumstances might have occurred to the deep sagacity of
an Italian patrician for the interest of his order, no doubt his
policy would have tended to this one aim,--the limitation of the
monarchy by the strength of an aristocracy endeared to the
agricultural population, owing to that population its own powers of
defence, with the wants and grievances of that population thoroughly
familiar, and willing to satisfy the one and redress the other: in
short, the great baron would have secured and promoted liberty
according to the notions of a seigneur and a Norman, by making the
king but the first nobleman of the realm. Had the policy lasted long
enough to succeed, the subsequent despotism, which changed a limited
into an absolute monarchy under the Tudors, would have been prevented,
with all the sanguinary reaction in which the Stuarts were the