The old order passed away, and the face of human society was made new.  The law-abiding and temperate genius of the Anglo-Saxon race saved England from the excesses, the horrors, and the dramatic incidents which marked this period of transition in France; but though more quietly effected, the change in England was not less marked, less momentous, or less permanent than on the Continent.  I have spoken in a former chapter of the religious revival which was the most striking result in England of the Revolution in France.  To-day I shall say a word about another result, or group of results, which may be summarized as Social Equalization.

The barriers between ranks and classes were to a large extent broken down.  The prescriptive privileges of aristocracy were reduced.  The ceremoniousness of social demeanour was diminished.  Great men were content with less elaboration and display in their retinues, equipages, and mode of living.  Dress lost its richness of ornament and its distinctive characteristics.  Young men of fashion no longer bedizened themselves in velvet, brocade, and gold lace.  Knights of the Garter no longer displayed the Blue Ribbon in Parliament.  Officers no longer went into society with uniform and sword.  Bishops laid aside their wigs; dignified clergy discarded the cassock.  Coloured coats, silk stockings, lace ruffles, and hair-powder survived only in the footmen’s liveries.  When the Reform Bill of 1832 received the Royal Assent, the Lord Bathurst of the period, who had been a member of the Duke of Wellington’s Cabinet, solemnly cut off his pigtail, saying, “Ichabod, for the glory is departed;” and to the first Reformed Parliament only one pigtail was returned (it pertained to Mr. Sheppard, M.P. for Frome)—­an impressive symbol of social transformation.

The lines of demarcation between the peerage and the untitled classes were partially obliterated.  How clear and rigid those lines had been it is difficult for us to conceive.  In Humphrey Clinker the nobleman refuses to fight a duel with the squire on the ground of their social inequality.  Mr. Wilberforce declined a peerage because it would exclude his sons from intimacy with private gentlemen, clergymen, and mercantile families.  I have stated in a previous chapter that Lord Bathurst, who was born in 1791, told me that at his private school he and the other sons of peers sate together on a privileged bench apart from the rest of the boys.  A typical aristocrat was the first Marquis of Abercorn.  He died in 1818, but he is still revered in Ulster under the name of “The Owld Marquis.”  This admirable nobleman always went out shooting in his Blue Ribbon, and required his housemaids to wear white kid gloves when they made his bed.  Before he married his first cousin, Miss Cecil Hamilton, he induced the Crown to confer on her the titular rank of an Earl’s daughter, that he might not marry beneath his position; and when he discovered that she contemplated eloping, he sent a message begging her to take the family coach, as it ought never to be said that Lady Abercorn left her husband’s roof in a hack chaise.  By such endearing traits do the truly great live in the hearts of posterity.