The fine Old Country Gentleman has an Elizabethan mansion, But what the dickens is the good of that if his means continually narrow in proportion to His family's expansion? If he gives up his deer, and sells his timber, dismisses his servants, and thinks of advertising his house for a grammar school, Or a lunatic asylum (As he often has to do), what is there in his lot to excite the jealousy of those darned Radicals, though the common comfort of that poor _caput lupinum_, the Land Owner, on however little a scale Seems invariably to rile 'em? Asks the fine Old Country Gentleman, one of the modern time. With an encumbered property, diminishing rent-roll, and expenses beyond his income, The question which confronts him at every corner is, whence will the needful "tin" come? And when they prate to us about our "improvidence," and advise us to "cut down" and economize, why, where, in the name of patience, I ask'll Be the pull of being a Country Gentleman at all, if one has to live like a retired pork-butcher or prosperous publican, and perhaps you will answer That question, Mr. Charles Milnes Gaskell![8] Of the fine Old Country Gentleman, one of the modern time. [Footnote 8: This gentleman had recently written an article on the subject in the _Nineteenth Century_.] The "profiteer" was already in Society and on the moors; _Punch_ reviled him in "My 'art's in the 'Ighlands," and in a picture of an opulent Semite swearing that he hasn't "a drop of Hebrew blood in ma veinth, 'thelp me." Du Maurier created Sir Gorgius Midas as typical of the New Plutocracy--a gross, bediamonded figure, surrounded by flunkeys, with Dukes and Duchesses as his pensioners. The alleged poverty-stricken condition of the aristocracy is a frequent theme: one ducal family can only afford to go to the opera when Sir Gorgius lends them his box. But the Dukes still had their uses. The Beresford Midases put their boy's name down both for Eton and Harrow, and decided to send him to whichever has most "dooks" when the time comes. The New Rich show themselves apt pupils in all the snobbery of rank. For example, Sir Gorgius is shocked at the innovation of ladies and gentlemen riding in or on omnibuses. This is not documentary evidence, of course, but it was perfectly legitimate caricature. Du Maurier was not attacking the self-made man whose creed is summed up in the Lancashire saying: "Them as 'as brass don't care a damn what them as 'asn't thinks on 'em." He bestowed his ridicule impartially on the servile plutocrats who aped the customs of the titled classes, and the aristocrats who were unable to grow poor with dignity. Du Maurier's contribution to the social history of the middle and later Victorian age was invaluable on its critical and satirical side. But he was emphatically an aristocrat in