It was, as Hannay has expressed it, the great gentry who seem to have accepted the girding of the sword, in something like turns, as both a dignity and a duty. “From such men the House of Commons took that high, that _gentle_ tone, which has often been so justly boasted of by its great men, and which it is to be hoped it will retain, through whatever changes are destined for it.” The dignity of representation in the earlier stages of parliamentary history does not appear to have extended beyond the knights of the shires; those of this select order might, if they had the ambition, contest among themselves, but it is difficult to imagine electoral contests among the representatives of a less exalted class--the citizens and burgesses, whose election was at first very much at the discretion of the sheriffs. When the real parliamentary strength lay in the baronage, the worthies who came up from the cities and boroughs to advise about taxation were not much regarded originally, and seem to have conducted themselves, during their brief visits to the Commons House, with a docility of demeanour, supposed to be in keeping with their native obscurity; as, for the most part, they were but nominees or placemen of Peers and Lords of parliament, of ecclesiastical hierarchs, of officers of State, or put forward by lords of manors, influential families, and dispensers of preferment of one kind or another, a retiring and deferential line of conduct was due from these mere parliamentary “pawns” to their patrons. This state of subjection appears foreign to the independence by presumption associated with the character of a member of parliament, and might be taken as belonging only to a feudal epoch; but with rare intervals of self-assertion on the part of the people, such as happened during the civil wars--when the equipoise of society was unsettled for a space--it must be admitted that at least a considerable portion of the Commons under the boroughmongering and patronage-monopolizing days, which reached to 1831, was not far removed from the condition of semi-vassalage as described, until the revision and extension of the representative system assimilated the constitution of the Commons in earnest to what by a plausible fiction it was “on trust” for generations assumed to be.