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 preposition; but it long lived on wherever Latin or French was used. And before long nobility won for itself a distinguishing outward badge. The device of hereditary coat-armour, a growth of the 12th century, did much to define and mark out the noble class throughout Europe. As it could be acquired by grant of the sovereign, and as, when once acquired, it went on from generation to generation, it answers exactly to the jus imaginum at Rome, the hereditary badge of nobility conferred by the election of the people. Those who possessed the right of coat-armour by immemorial use, or by grant in regular form, formed the class of nobility or gentry, words which, it must again be remembered, are strictly of the same meaning. They held whatever privileges or advantages have attached in different times and places to the rank of nobility or gentry. In England indeed a variety of causes hindered nobility or gentry from ever obtaining the importance which they obtained, for instance, in France; But perhaps no cause was more important than the growth of the peerage. That institution at once set up a new standard of nobility, a new form of the nobility of office. The peer—in strictness, the peer in his own person only, not even his children—became the only noble; the ideas of nobility and gentry thus became divorced in a way in which they are not in any other country. Those who would elsewhere have been counted as the nobility, the bearers of coat-armour by good right, were hindered from forming a class holding any substantial privilege. In a word, the growth of the peerage hindered the existence in England of any nobility in the continental sense of the word. The esquires, knights, lesser barons, even the remote descendants of peers, that is, the noblesse of other countries, in England remained gentlemen, but not noblemen—simple commoners, that is, without legal advantage over their fellow-commoners who had no jus imaginum to boast of. There can be no doubt that the class in England which answers to the noblesse of other lands is the class that bears coat-armour, the gentry strictly so called. Had they been able to establish and to maintain any kind of privilege, even that of mere honorary precedence, they would exactly answer to continental nobility. That coat-armour has been lavishly granted and often assumed without right, that the word “gentleman” has acquired various secondary senses, proves nothing; that is the natural result of a state of things in which the status of gentry carries with it no legal advantage, and yet is eagerly sought after on social grounds. If coat-armour, and thereby the rank of gentry, has been lavishly granted, some may think that the rank of peerage has often been lavishly granted also. In short, there is no real nobility in England; for the class which answers to foreign nobility has so long ceased to have any practical privileges that it has long ceased to be looked on as a nobility, and the word nobility has been transferred to another class which has nothing answering to it out of the three British kingdoms. This last class in strictness takes in only the peers personally; at the outside it cannot be stretched beyond those of their children and grandchildren who bear the courtesy titles of lord and lady.

No attempt has been here made to trace out the history of nobility in the various countries and, we must add, cities of Europe. All that has been attempted has been to point out some general truths, and to refer to some specially striking instances. Once more, it must be borne in mind that, while it is essential to the idea of nobility that it should carry with it some hereditary privilege, the nature and extent of that privilege may vary endlessly. In the 18th century the nobility of France and the nobility of Poland alike answered to the very strictest definition of nobility; but the political positions of the two were as broadly contrasted as the positions of any two classes of men could be. The nobility of France, keeping the most oppressive social and personal privileges, had been shorn of all political and even administrative power; the tyrants of the people were the slaves of the king. In Poland sixty thousand gentlemen, rich and poor, famous and obscure, but all alike gentlemen, rode out to choose a king by a unanimous vote, and to bind him when chosen by such conditions as they thought good. Those sixty thousand, like the populus of Rome, formed a narrow oligarchy as regarded the rest of the nation, but a wild democracy among themselves. Poland, in short, came nearer than any kingdom or country of large extent to the nature of an aristocracy, as we have seen aristocracy in the aristocratic cities. The chief power of the state was placed neither in the prince nor in the nation at large; it was held by a noble class. The kingly power in Poland, like the ducal power at Venice, had been so narrowed that Poland, though she still kept a king, called herself a republic no less than Venice. And whatever was taken from the king went to the gain of the noble order. But the nobility of a large country, even though used to act politically as an order, could never put on that orderly and legal character which distinguishes the true civic patriciates. It never could come so nearly as a civic patriciate could to being something like the rule of the best in any sense of those words.

The tendency of modern times has been towards the breaking down of formal hereditary privileges. In modern commonwealths, above all, they have been thought to be essentially inconsistent with republican institutions. The truth of the matter is rather that the circumstances of most modern commonwealths have been unfavourable to the preservation, and still more to the growth, of privileged bodies. Where they existed, as in Switzerland, they have been overthrown. Where they did not exist, as in America, everything has made it more and more impossible that they should arise. And, as modern changes have commonly attacked the power both of kings and of nobles, the common notion has come that kingship and nobility have some necessary connexion. It has seemed as if any form of nobility was inconsistent with a republican form of government, while nobility, in some shape or other, has come to be looked on as a natural, if not a necessary, appendage to a monarchy. And as far as regards the social side of kingship this is true. A court seems more natural where a chain of degrees leads gradually up from the lowest subject to the throne than when all beneath the throne are nearly on a level. And from one point of view, that from which the kingly house is but the noblest of the noble, kingship and nobility are closely allied. But in the more strictly