When did the idea that trade was derogatory to men of good birth, otherwise the Continental point of view based on a different social structure, creep into England? No writer, so far as I know, has ever attempted an explanation of what suggests a paradox. That it is an alien importation and in conflict with the facts of English life up to a certain period seems indisputable, and all evidence would point to the Hanoverian succession as roughly marking this mysterious change of attitude. Eliminating, and for obvious reasons, the greater and more powerful Houses, the record of most old English families is a contradiction in terms of the rigid but quite logical observance of a Continental _noblesse_. There is about an even chance that sooner or later you tap the root of the family and its fortunes in a woolstapler, a goldsmith, a vintner, an iron-forger, a flockmaster, a haberdasher, or a grocer, and last, but assuredly not least, in a successful lawyer. What is more, we find these worthies seated upon their newly acquired acres with a coat of arms, inherited or acquired, without any apparent consciousness of being upstarts or parvenus. In the modern sense they were probably not so regarded by their longer-seated country neighbours. As the latter’s near relations, to say nothing of their collaterals, were themselves largely engaged in trade of some sort or in various avocations assuredly not more aristocratic, such an attitude would be inconceivable! We all know the modern ideas about such things, and need not waste words over them. Nor is it of any consequence how much they may have modified in the last fifty years. For our point lies in the fact that they could not well have existed at a period to which a popular superstition attributes a rigid and long-lost exclusiveness. The ‘very respectable family’ of Blankshire in Jane Austen’s time undoubtedly looked askance at trade. Yet it seems probable that their own great-great-grandfathers would not even have understood what such an attitude meant. It does seem rather whimsical that the Continental point of view should have established itself in theory, if not altogether in practice, in a country whose landed gentry had not merely intermarried freely with commerce, but in such innumerable instances were themselves the product of it. Nor is this all. For in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries their progeny and collaterals were of necessity much engaged in trade, and indeed not seldom in occupations that in these presumably democratic days would be rejected offhand by anyone with the least pretension to gentility. The more decorative alternatives to a livelihood, as we should now regard them, either did not exist much before the Georges and the rapid economic developments of the eighteenth century, or were utterly inadequate to the demands of the younger son, when, with smaller properties and larger families, his name was legion.