In the earlier part of this century Dr. Arnold inveighed with characteristic vigour against “the insolencies of our aristocracy, the scandalous exemption of the peers from all ignominious punishments short of death, and the insolent practice of allowing peers to vote in criminal trials on their honour, while other men vote on their oath.”  But generally the claims of rank and birth were admitted with a childlike cheerfulness.  The high function of government was the birthright of the few.  The people, according to episcopal showing, had nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.  The ingenious author of Russell’s Modern Europe states in his preface to that immortal work that his object in adopting the form of a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son is “to give more Weight to the Moral and Political Maxims, and to entitle the author to offer, without seeming to dictate to the World, such reflections on Life and Manners as are supposed more immediately to belong to the higher orders in Society.”  Nor were the privileges of rank held to pertain merely to temporal concerns.  When Selina Countess of Huntingdon asked the Duchess of Buckingham to accompany her to a sermon of Whitefield’s, the Duchess replied:  “I thank your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers; their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions.  It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth; and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.”

The exclusive and almost feudal character of the English peerage was destroyed, finally and of set purpose, by Pitt when he declared that every man who had an estate of ten thousand a year had a right to be a peer.  In Lord Beaconsfield’s words, “He created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy.  He made peers of second-rate squires and fat graziers.  He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street, and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill.”  This democratization of the peerage was accompanied by great modifications of pomp and stateliness in the daily life of the peers.  In the eighteenth century the Duke and Duchess of Atholl were always served at their own table before their guests, in recognition of their royal rank as Sovereigns of the Isle of Man; and the Duke and Duchess of Argyll observed the same courteous usage for no better reason than because they liked it.  The “Household Book” of Alnwick Castle records the amplitude and complexity of the domestic hierarchy which ministered to the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland; and at Arundel and Belvoir, and Trentham and Wentworth, the magnates of the peerage lived in a state little less than regal.  Seneschals and gentlemen-ushers,