It was, however, spite of all its wealth and puissance, not yet qualified to maintain such a station unquestioned. The English nobility, haughty as it is, can scarcely measure itself against the French in antiquity and purity of blood (if any value is to be attached to such things), and in no degree against the higher German nobility, which is for the most part intact.[91] It dazzles only by the old historic names so wisely retained, which appear through the whole of English history like standing masks; though new families, often of very mean and even discreditable extraction, (such as descendants of mistresses, and the like), are continually concealed behind them. The English aristocracy has indeed the most solid advantages over those of all other countries--from its real wealth, and yet more from the share in the legislative power allotted to it by the Constitution: _but as it is not upon these grounds that it chooses to assert or to justify its supremacy, but precisely upon its assumed noble blood and higher extraction_, the pretension must, unquestionably, appear to the rest of the world doubly ludicrous. The members of the aristocracy probably had an instinctive feeling of this; and thus, by a tacit convention--not nobility, not wealth, but an entirely new power was placed upon the throne, as supreme and absolute sovereign--Fashion: a goddess who in England alone, reigns in person, (if I may so express myself), with despotic and inexorable sway,--though always represented to mortal eyes by a few clever usurpers of either sex. The spirit of _caste_, which, emanating from this source, descends through all stages of society in greater or less force, has received here a power, consistency and full development, wholly unexampled in any other country. The having visited on an intimate footing in a lower class is sufficient to ensure you an extremely cold reception in the very next step of the ladder; and no Brahmin can shrink with more horror from all contact with a Paria, than an 'Exclusive' from intercourse with a 'Nobody.'--Every class of society, as well as every field, in England is separated from every other by a hedge of thorns. Each has its own manners and turns of expression,--its 'cant' language, as it is called, and, above all, a supreme and absolute contempt for all below it. Of course every reflecting person sees at a glance, that a society so constituted must necessarily become eminently provincial (_kleinstädtisch_, i. e. _small-townish_) in its several coteries; and this strikingly distinguishes it from the large and cosmopolitan society of Paris.