Besides these false impulses given to the continental tone of society, we have noticed a third, and that is the preposterous value given amongst foreigners to what is military. This tendency is at once a cause of vulgarity and an exponent of vulgarity. Thence comes the embroidery of collars, the betasseling, the befrogging, the flaunting attempts at "costuming." It is not that the military character is less fitted to a gentlemanly refinement than any other; but the truth is, that no professional character whatsoever, when pushed into exclusive esteem, can continue to sustain itself on the difficult eminence of pure natural high breeding. All professions alike have their besetting vices, pedantries, and infirmities. In some degree they correct each other when thrown together on terms of equality. But on the Continent, the lawyer and the clergyman is every where degraded; the senator has usually no existence; and the authentic landed proprietor, liberated from all duties but the splendid and non-technical duties of patriotism, comes forward at foreign courts only in thee character of a military officer. At some courts this is carried so far, that no man can be presented out of uniform. Has the military profession, on the other hand, benefited by such partiality? So far from it, that, were the continental armies liable to that sort of _surveillance_ which our own Horse Guards exercises over the social morals of the officers, we do not believe that one of those armies could exist for five years. The facts placed beyond denial by the capture of foreign officers' baggage, by the violated parole of honour, and by many other incidents of the late war, combine to prove the low tone of gentlemanly honour and probity in the ill-paid armies of the Continent. Our purpose has been, to insist on the capital patriotic uses to which so splendid an aristocracy as ours _has_ been applied, and will be applied, so long as it is suffered to exist undisturbed by the growing democracy (and, worse than _that_, by the anarchy) of the times. These uses are principally four, which we shall but indicate in a few words. First, it is in the nobility of Great Britain that the Conservative principle--which cannot but be a momentous agency wheresoever there is any thing good to protect from violence, or any thing venerable to uphold in sanctity--is chiefly lodged. Primogeniture and the church are the two corner-stones upon which our civil constitution ultimately reposes; and neither of these, from the monumental character of our noble houses, held together through centuries by the peculiar settlements of their landed properties, has any power to survive the destruction of a distinct patrician order.