As the marquises people the debatable land between the dukes and the earls, so do the viscounts between the earls and the barons.  A child whom Matthew Arnold was examining in grammar once wrote of certain words which he found it hard to classify under their proper parts of speech that they were “thrown into the common sink, which is adverbs.”  I hope I shall not be considered guilty of any disrespect if I say that ex-Speakers, ex-Secretaries of State, successful generals, and ambitious barons who are not quite good enough for earldoms, are “thrown into the common sink, which is viscounts.”  Not only heralds and genealogists, but every one who has the historic sense, must have felt an emotion of regret when the splendid title of twenty-third Baron Dacre was merged by Mr. Speaker Brand in the pinchbeck dignity of first Viscount Hampden.

After viscounts, barons.  The baronage of England is headed by the bishops; but, as we have already discoursed of those right reverend peers, we, Dante-like, will not reason of them, but pass on—­only remarking, as we pass, that it is held on good authority that no human being ever experiences a rapture so intense as an American bishop from a Western State when he first hears himself called “My lord” at a London dinner-party.  After the spiritual barons come the secular barons—­the “common or garden” peers of the United Kingdom.  Of these there are considerably more than three hundred; and of all, except some thirty or forty at the most, it may be said without offence that they are products of the opulent Middle Class.  Pitt destroyed deliberately and for ever the exclusive character of the British peerage when, as Lord Beaconsfield said, he “created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy.”  And in order to gain admission to this “plebeian aristocracy” men otherwise reasonable and honest will spend incredible sums, undergo prodigious exertions, associate themselves with the basest intrigues, and perform the most unblushing tergiversations.  Lord Houghton told me that he said to a well-known politician who boasted that he had refused a peerage:  “Then you made a great mistake.  A peerage would have secured you three things that you are much in need of—­social consideration, longer credit with your tradesmen, and better marriages for your younger children.”

It is unlucky that a comparatively recent change has put it out of the power of a Prime Minister to create fresh Irish peers, for an Irish peerage was a cheap and convenient method of rewarding political service.[24] Lord Palmerston held that, combining social rank with eligibility to the House of Commons, it was the most desirable distinction for a politician.  Pitt, when his banker Mr. Smith (who lived in Whitehall) desired the privilege of driving through the Horse Guards, said:  “No, I can’t give you that; but I will make you an Irish peer;” and the banker became the first Lord Carrington.