I have long been of opinion that the last line was far more common than is generally understood. Until recently, however, I have not been able to establish my theory that the connection between the country and the City was close, continuous, and widespread; that the younger sons were sent up to the City as they are now sent into the Army, for a career considered both honourable and profitable. If this theory can be maintained, it is quite obvious that the importance of London in the eyes of the country must have been very much greater than is generally understood: its political weight must have been much more than has hitherto been allowed, and its dignity and the dignity of its chief offices must be in a corresponding degree enhanced. It was not by men who had been humble village boys that great offices in the City were filled, but by men of gentility and of good connections. This theory, if it is well founded, will also show why London has never created an hereditary aristocracy of her own; why, in a word, London never became a Venice or a Genoa. The leaders among the citizens always, according to my view, were connected with brothers and cousins over the whole of the country; and when the great nobles rode up to their town houses with their following of hundreds, all gentlemen, they entered a City containing their own people, their own cousins, living in Palaces equal to their own; apparelled in the robes of authority and with the gold chains of power and of dignity. Thus, I find groups of families from this or that county—the Fitzwarrens of Devon and Somerset with their cousins the Whittingtons of Somerset and Gloucester; the Chicheles, Northampton; the Brembres, Philpots, and Sevenokes from Kent; the Greshams, Bacons, Boleyns, and Banhams from Norfolk; and this indicates not only that many country families were connected with the City, but that there were groups of families, cousins near or far, which habitually sent up their boys to London. But more direct proofs are necessary to establish what, I feel certain, was the case, that this connection was widespread and even general; that a younger son of a gentle family, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century at least, regarded trade in the City as a desirable and honourable profession. I do not think that this was the case after the middle of the seventeenth century. One of the latest instances, indeed, of the country gentleman’s son being sent up to town and made an apprentice is that of Gibbon’s grandfather. There are, however, many other facts which point in the same direction:—