for any commercial or pecuniary causes, they never dreamed of such a thing; or, if a spurious ennobling took place, it was deemed a glaring and an odious violation of the fundamental laws of aristocratic society. Now the ideas of the world have become so changed, or rather so corrupted, on this point, that the prime notion of nobility no longer is attached to military tenure or service; but, on the contrary, we find titles given, nay, bought and sold, for any the most miscellaneous services, and the meridian of nobleness, of elevation, of power, altogether eliminated from the qualifications that the nobleman ought to possess. Back-stair services, lobby services, electioneering services, counting-house services, any services as well as military services, have been deemed sufficient causes for procuring a patent of nobility to those who could allege them. Titles and causes of distinction they might have been, but surely not of nobility, not of hereditary honour and distinction, the tenure and essence of which should ever be attached to territorial power gained and held by the sword. And this lowering of the tone of nobility, this communising of what ought to be ever held up as a thing apart, as a thing originating with the first beginnings of a nation, and remaining fixed till the nation becomes itself extinct, has done no good to society: it has not raised the tone of the commons, it has only lowered that of the nobles: it has emasculated the one without adding any strength to the other. In all nations, as long as the nobility have remained essentially a military order, holding their own by their own strength, the fortunes of that nation have advanced; but whenever the nobles have become degenerate, and therefore the commons licentious--the former holding only by prescriptive respect, and the latter subjected to them only in theory, not in practice--the fate of that nation has been pronounced, and its decline has already begun. The destruction and absorption of the good fiefs of France, in the time of Louis XI., laid the way for the razing of the châteaux, and the decapitation of their owners by the Cardinal de Richelieu, in the time of Louis XIII.; and this gradual degenerating process of undermining the true strength of the nobles, led to the corruption of the nation, and to its reduction to the primary starting-point of society in the reign of Louis XVI. So, too, in England, the sapping of the strength of the nobles, in the reign of Henry VIII., added to the corrupt proceedings of the times of James I., caused the Great Rebellion in the reign of his successor. The nation has never recovered from this fatal revolution of the seventeenth century. Like France, England has shone awhile, and sustained itself both in arts and arms; but the dissolving process has begun long ago with us as it did with them. One order of the state--the order of nobles--has been constantly decreasing in power and influence; and the