stranger saluted seriously by the title of "my lord," will very soon have a mob at his heels? Is it that the English nobility can dispense with immunities from taxation, with legal supremacies, and with the sword of justice; in short, with all artificial privileges, having these two authentic privileges from nature--stern limitation of their numbers, and a prodigious share in the most durable of the national property? Vainly does the continental noble flourish against such omnipotent charters the rusty keys of his dungeon, or the sculptured image of his family gallows. Power beyond the law is not nobility, is not antiquity. Tax-gatherers, from the two last centuries, have been the founders of most titled houses in France; and the _prestige_ of antiquity is, therefore, but rarely present. But were it otherwise, and that a "noblesse" could plead one uniform descent from crusaders, still, if they were a hundred thousand strong--and, secondly, had no property--and, thirdly, comprehended in their lists a mere gentry, having generally no pretensions at all to ancient or illustrious descent, they would be--nothing. And exactly on that basis reposes the difference between the Continent and England. Eternally the ridiculous pretence of being "noble" by family, seems to claim for obscure foreigners some sort of advantage over the plain untitled Englishman; but eternally the travelled Englishman recollects, that, so far as this equivocal "nobility" had been really fenced with privileges, those have been long in a course of superannuation; whilst the counter-vailing advantages for his own native aristocracy are precisely those which time or political revolutions never _can_ superannuate. Thus far as to the constitution of the British nobility and those broad popular distinctions which determine for each nobility its effectual powers. The next point is, to exhibit the operation of these differential powers in the condition of manners which they produce. But, as a transitional stage lying between the two here described--between the tenure of our aristocracy as a casual principle, and the popular working of our aristocracy as an effect--we will interpose a slight notice of the habits peculiar to England by which this effect is partly sustained.