A considerate aristocracy had of late done more and more to gratify public taste in that respect. The “upper classes” quarrelled about their children, about their heirlooms, about the “other man,” or the “secret woman,” about anything and everything. But, in spite of all, the average Briton, with inborn snobbishness, dearly loved a lord. Kind hearts were at a discount; but coronets fetched heavy premiums, especially in the American market. Broadly speaking, “simple faith” was non-existent; but Norman blood, however vitiated, covered in a double sense the multitude of sins. The Divorce Court had virtually become a public laundry, in which judge, counsel, and witnesses were constantly engaged in washing the soiled linen of the British peerage, a task varied, however, by similar operations on behalf of the ladies and gentlemen of the stage. The business classes, still solid, stolid, and worried, were mostly occupied in efforts to put money in the purse to an extent sufficient to meet the ever-growing expenses of modern life in England. By reason of this problem, there were fewer marriages than of yore; and, yet more significant, the birth-rate fell and fell. There was still great wealth in England, but it was in fewer hands. The Jew syndicates, the drink-sellers, the drapers, and the betting agents largely absorbed the nation’s gold. But the poor in pocket were by no means poor in spirit. Pampered and petted by political parties, the British working-man had realised the uses of the weapons placed at his disposal. He had a vote, and he used it, whereas the middle-class man did not. He had the weight of numbers behind him, and he meant to use that too. Yet, notwithstanding all these indications of decay, there was still in every rank a goodly leaven; the problem was, whether there was enough of it to leaven the whole lump, and resuscitate the nation. If, instead of the return of the native after only twenty-five years, the boy-poet, Keats, could have come back (from that bourn whence no traveller returns), after nearer a hundred years, it is to be feared he still would have found an “inhuman dearth of noble natures,” and still gloomier signs-- “Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways Made for our searching.” It was a covetous age, but it did not covet earnestly the best of gifts: “Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance, These are the seals of that most firm assurance, Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength.” But Shelley, like Keats, was forgotten, or unknown. The age of mediocrity had no concern with intellectual giants; the period of small men, with parochial ideas, nothing in common with great conceptions of-- “Love from its awful throne of patient power,” looking down upon humanity; or of humanity ready-- “To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates.”