Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/144

 and Warwick, who fell at the Battle of Barnet, and among whose dying words Shakspeare has written these—"Who liv'd King, but I could dig his grave?" Whether he used these words or not it is certain he and Hotspur and others were very different sort of peers from the persons bearing the name of peers who were the courtiers or footmen of the Tudor s and the Stuarts. Footman is the proper word. Is not the court dress at this day the dress of a footman? And as every peer puts on that dress at certain times, by doing so he transforms himself into a court footman. Is a court footman a proper and fit legislator for a great nation? A great soldier, a Marlborough or Wellington, owes his distinction not to being a peer but to being a great soldier. Of the two greatest admirals one did not live to bear the title of earl; and the body of the other was torn from its receptacle in Westminster Abbey, and cast like that of a masterless dog—for a dog that has a master is decently buried—into a pit. This was the fate of a man whom even Samuel Johnson, while bestowing on Hampden no more honourable name than that of "the zealot of rebellion," censures for acting on one occasion with temerity, in terms which may indicate the degree of his panegyric—