I thus inherit. I wish to remain what I am, and to hand my father's titles and estates down to my heirs. I do not know that I thus seek my own gratification at the expense of my country, which has been very great, free and happy, under this order of things. I am satisfied that if we do not go to war with the French, this order of things will be destroyed. We may fall by the War, but we must fall without it. The thing is worth fighting for, and to fight for it we are resolved.'"

Page 184, note 2. The following notes on English politics Iwere used in lectures on Mr. Emerson's return:

"The English youth, highborn, has a narrow road to travel. Besides his horse and gun and his clubhouse, all he knows is the door of the House of Commons. So aristocratic is the frame of society, that the House of Commons is in the hands of the House of Lords. The Commons are the lords that shall be. Of the 658 members of the lower House, 455 have been lately shown to be representatives of the House of Lords. Before 1832 the House was violently patrician. In 1793, it was declared in a petition presented to the House by the (afterward) Earl Grey, that 307 members were put into the House by 154 persons, owners and patrons of boroughs. The Reform Bill in 1832 reduced the patronage, yet a majority of seats in the House may be filled by the nominees of the nobility. Of the Cabinet, one half is usually peers, and the other half relations of peers. Thus the aristocracy have the direction of public affairs. They naturally prize this as a career. Politics,' said the Duke of Norfolk to Shelley, is the proper career of a young man of ability in your station. That career is most advantageous, because it is a monopoly.' A little success in that line goes far, since the number of competitors is limited. In such a Parliament class-legislation is

inevitable; and offices and pensions are given to those who have votes and patronage to buy them with. Mr. Peyronnet Thompson's theory of aristocracy is, To make one of a family strong enough to compel the public to support all the rest.' And it only needs to look into the files of newspapers opposed to the Government in the last century to find many ugly anecdotes, which, after all allowance for party exaggeration, expose the manner of saddling the public with pensions for their children, relatives, tutors, and even bastards. The Duke of Beaufort's will left annual sums to his younger sons, which, with great naïveté, he devised should be paid until they should obtain places or pensions to certain amounts, under Government.

“An Earl of Uxbridge, with an estate of £60,000 a year, obtained an annual pension for his daughter of £300, in her own name; and after her marriage, another pension of the like sum to her, in the list of Scotch pensions, under her new name of Erskine. She continued to draw both, and the journals had their joke on the double Lady Louisa.

“These abuses were much mended by the Reform Bill. In 1780, Mr. Pitt said in the House that, Without a reform in Parliament, it was impossible for any honest man to remain a minister of England.'

Page 184, note 3. Commissions in the army could then be bought.

Page 185, note 1. Again from the stray sheets on English politics:

"One wonders how a Parliament thus constituted remains in any manner representative of the bulk of the population. But many of the younger nobles espouse the popular cause and the classes of trade and manufactures force their voices into the House. Men of brilliant popular talents like Burke,

Pitt, Mackintosh, Macaulay, Canning, Sheridan, sit for the close boroughs, and, one thing with another, we have got in modern times a wonderful assembly, its moral reputation much mended, though bribery is still permitted, but its intellectual and social reputation supreme. "It is petulant the common saying is that no question can be mooted, no statement made there but, out of 654 members, will find some fit and ready to sift it. That, especially, it is the most severe anthropometer or test of men. Canning said, when alarm was expressed at the probable return of O'Connell and his friends to Parliament, It is in Parliament I wish to see them. I have never known a demagogue who, when elected to a seat in this house, did not in the course of six months shrink to his proper dimensions.' Page 186, note I. ..That repose

Which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere."

Tennyson, Lady Clara Vere de Vere."

Of his experiences in London society Mr. Emerson wrote: "I am to say what is strange, but it so happened, that the higher were the persons in the social scale whom I conversed with, the less marked was their national accent, and the more I found them like the most cultivated persons in America.’

Page 189, note 1. Jean de la Quintinie wrote a book on gardening which was translated into English by John Evelyn. Arthur Young was an agricultural experimenter and writer in the last part of the eighteenth century, and wrote several important works on the subject of agriculture in England and the use of waste lands. His Travels in France is quoted by Carlyle often in his French Revolution. George III. contributed to his Annals of Agriculture under the name of Ralph Robinson.

In these Annals, Young highly praises the improvements in cultivation and cattle-breeding made by Robert Bakewell in the middle of the eighteenth century.

John Joseph Mechi, a great authority on scientific farming, attained remarkable results in Essex by irrigating his farm with liquefied manure by steam-power.

Page 189, note 2. In Dibdin's Literary Reminiscences, vol. I., xii.

Page 189, note 3. Mr. Emerson took great pleasure in the naïf account of his life and adventures, given by the valiant and philosophic Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury. He was the elder brother of George Herbert, the poet.

Page 190, note 1. Penshurst in Kent was Sir Philip Sidney's birthplace, and Wilton House the residence of his sister the Countess of Pembroke.

Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, wrote The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney.

Page 191, note 1. In the lecture "Natural Aristocracy which Mr. Emerson gave in London, after granting the claims of the really great to honor and place, he said, " But mankind do not extend the same indulgence to those who claim and enjoy the same prerogative, but render no returns. The day is darkened when the golden river runs down into mud; when genius grows idle and wanton and reckless of its fine duties of being Saint, Prophet, Inspirer to its humble fellows, baulks their respect and confounds their understanding by silly extravagances. . . To live without duties is obscene. He made so much allowance for the outrages to which the misdeeds of idle aristocrats might incite the poor and ignorant that Lord Morpeth urged him to suppress the passage, should he give the lecture again. It still stands in the essay on " Aristocracy" in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 192, note 1. of Horace Walpole.

Page 193, note I.

George Selwyn (1719-91), the friend

Causes Célèbres Étrangères, publiées

en France pour la première fois, et traduites de l'Espagnol, l'Italien et l'Allemagne. Paris: 1827-28. Par une Société de jurisconsultes et de gens de lettres.

Another work of the same kind is the Causes Célèbres, Répertoire générale des causes célèbres anciennes et modernes, rédigé par une Société d'hommes de lettres sous la direction de B. Saint-Edme. Paris: Rosier, 1834-35.

An English work appeared in 1849, entitled: Celebrated Trials connected with the Aristocracy in the Relations of Private Life. London: W. Benning & Co., 1849.

Page 195, note 1. A clergyman who prepared students for the examinations of admission to Oxford and Cambridge told the editor that, even in the colleges in which the standard of scholarship was very high, rank was, to some extent, accepted as an equivalent.

Page 195, note 2. History of English Universities, " Die englischen Universitäten," by Victor Aimé Huber (2 vols. Cassel, 1839-40), was translated into English by Francis William Newman.

Page 195, note 3.

"Some great estates provide, but not

A mastering mind, so both are lost thereby.'
Herbert, The Church Porch.

Page 197, note I.

The lord is the peasant that was,

The peasant the lord that shall be.

Who liveth in the palace hall

Waneth fast and spendeth all.

"Woodnotes," II., Poems.