But it has been given me during the last quarter of a century to make a tolerably intimate acquaintance almost parish by parish with a good many other English counties more typical for the purpose in hand, to trace back the fortunes of families and estates, and, not least, to appraise their domestic history as it is written on tomb and tablet in hundreds of parish churches. Genealogies, county histories, family documents are eloquent enough of the various careers followed by men of gentle birth and of the enterprises which brought so many landed families into being and continued to engage the energies of younger sons regardless of lineage. Most of us have heard, from the lips, probably, of old ladies of a past generation, that the Army and Navy, Church and Bar, were the only callings for a gentleman. Anglo-Irish squireens, of Cromwellian or Williamite origin, with the thickest of brogues, still very likely give utterance to what half a century ago was accepted as a sort of good old English tradition. It occurred to no one, apparently, that in old England, say pre-Georgian England, there was no Army to speak of and no Navy (as a career for a gentleman); that the Church meant anything or nothing; while the Bar, aristocratic no doubt, was a little too much so, or at least too expensive, for most younger sons of average country squires. But it is on the chancel walls of parish churches that the Tudor or Jacobean _novus homo_ proclaims most convincingly the current absence of any commercial shamefacedness. To-day the merchant squire who starts the family tomb with the family acres is almost always writ down thereon as a territorial magnate pure and simple. All allusion to the shop is suppressed. The alderman squire of the seventeenth century, on the other hand, looks down on us from beneath his inherited or acquired armorial bearings quite unabashed in the character of a prosperous mercer or woolstapler. With the ladies, too, who so frequently brought the profits of commerce to improve the fortunes of a distinguished line, the parental haberdasher or clothier who provided their dower is frankly recognised in their own or their husband’s mortuary inscription. And this, I have little doubt, for the simple reason that there was no incentive to the curious make-believe that has since been fostered by a healthy but utterly confused social system. Human nature assuredly has not changed. Quite possibly there was friction on other accounts between the Londoner and his country neighbours. But as the sons and uncles and cousins of the latter were deep in trade, local or otherwise, the candour of the sculptured tomb in the parish church seems merely natural.