It was true that young men of sounding name and title were ever to be found in his train, thereby giving real countenance to one from whom they fancied (till they found out their mistake) that they themselves derived celebrity; thus enabling him to effect a lodgement in the outskirts of aristocracy; but he could not penetrate inland, so to speak, any more than foreign merchants can advance farther than to Canton, in the dominions of the Emperor of China.[22] He was only tolerated in the regions of real rank and fashion--a fact of which he had a very galling consciousness; though it did not, apparently, disturb his equanimity, or interrupt the systematic and refined sycophancy by which alone he could secure his precarious position. With some sad exceptions, I think that Great Britain has reason to be proud of her aristocracy. I do not speak now of those gaudy flaunting personages, of either sex, who, by their excesses or eccentricities, are eternally obtruding themselves, their manners, dress, and equipage, upon the offended ear and eye of the public; but of those who occupy their exalted sphere in simplicity, in calmness, and in unobtrusive dignity and virtue. I am no flatterer or idolater of the nobility. I have a profound sense of the necessity and advantage of the _institution_: but I shall ever pay its _members_, personally, an honest homage only, after a stern and keen scrutiny into their personal pretensions; thinking of them ever in the spirit of those memorable words of Scripture--"_Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required_," and that not hereafter only, but HERE also. No one would visit their faults and follies with a more unsparing severity than I; yet making all just allowances for their peculiar perils and temptations, exposed, as they are, especially at the period of their entrance upon life, to sedulous and systematic sycophancy, too often also to artful and designing profligacy. Can, however, anything excite greater indignation and disgust in the mind of a thoughtful and independent observer than the instances occasionally exhibited of persons of rank presumptuously imagining that they enjoy a sort of prescriptive immunity from the consequences of misconduct? An insolent or profligate nobleman is a spectacle becoming every day more dangerous to exhibit in this country; of that he may be assured.