hope that the hereditary monarchy will be the British nation's great safeguard to protect it from falling into materialism, which menaces all commercial peoples in the

new era.

It is sometimes said that the age which came to an end when Queen Victoria was crowned, and which may be counted as having coincided with the century subsequent to the entry into public life of the elder Pitt, was marked by coarseness in high places and by other features which denoted the prevalence of a materialistic spirit in the nation. But materialism is inseparable from human nature, and the forms which the malady took in that period were less subtle and penetrating than those with which it besets modern communities. Whatever the faults of the society which assembled at the Coronation of Queen Victoria, it did not take its measure of men by the length of their purses. It was the last muster of a society which, with various talent, had produced Gray's "Elegy" and Cowper's "Task" and Byron's "Childe Harold"; it had inspired the noble canvases of Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney and Lawrence; and in its own domain it had fostered the statesmanship and the eloquence of Pitt and Fox, of Burke, Sheridan and Canning. By what it has left behind, its titles to refinement may best be judged. Moreover, those who, in their youth, have had the happiness of knowing the last survivors of that age, or who have frequented some historic house while it was still the sanctuary of tradition, are able to form some estimate of the qualities of a noble race of men and women, and to compare their manners and surroundings with those of their grandchildren.

Before taking leave of the brilliant assemblage which was grouped round the throne when Queen Victoria was

lifted into it, we should notice that the dignified personages composing it were not members of an ancient nobility. Few of them, even of those whose fathers and grandfathers had been in power and place during the eighteenth century, were of families which had been noble, in the English sense, a hundred years. Their stately manners, which were those of men and women born to rule, had not been handed down to them by crusading or feudal ancestors. The year that the House of Hanover came the British throne the Spectator,1 criticising the methods of pedigree makers in those days, said, "There is scarce a beggar in the streets who would not find himself descended from some great man." It was only in this sense that many of the political families, which were powerful in the eighteenth century, were of ancient lineage. Only one or two of the great houses, such as the Howards. and the Seymours, had held high place in the land before the Reformation. The nobility of a few of them dated from the dissolution of the monasteries, as did that of the Russells, or from the early Stuart period when the Cavendishes were ennobled. The reigns of Charles II. and of William and Mary were the most fruitful, before the eighteenth century began, in peerages which produced powerful politicians in the great age of parliamentary government. But much of the nobility which, at the Coronation of Queen Victoria, had reached either the highest rank in the peerage or, short of that, a position of great prestige, owing to personal achievement or territorial influence, was so recent, that it had been created almost within the memory of persons present in Westminster Abbey. The oldest peer who was there was born, as

1 October 27, 1714. The authorship of the number is unknown.

we have seen, in 1752. It was not till 1761 that the Grosvenors came forth from the ranks of country gentlemen and obtained their first step in the peerage in which they were destined to attain to the highest rank. Sir Hugh Smithson, who had been made an earl in 1749, had to wait only seventeen years from his first peerage before becoming Duke of Northumberland. The Grenvilles, who treated marriage as a science, and who, to use a French expression, were les plus grands épouseurs du siècle, only in this year, 1752, reached the House of Lords by the death of a peeress in her own right, who had borne an heir to one of them. As to the Dundases, the Lascelleses and the Greys, the senior lord present at Queen Victoria's Coronation was already between forty and fifty years old when those respectable families received their first patent of nobility.

The evolution of these honourable country gentlemen into a caste of great nobles, within the space of one or two human lives, is a most interesting phenomenon in the social history of nations. It forms one more proof of how the highest honours and dignities in the realm of England were open to persons of comparatively modest condition in an age of reputed exclusiveness. They were nearly all landowners, a few of them being of sufficiently long lineage to have qualified them for baronetcies before the Civil War, like the Grosvenors, who bore a Norman name, or of wide territorial influence, like the Greys of Northumberland. But for the most part the families, which became politically great in the eighteenth century, were unknown in English history two hundred years before the Coronation of Queen Victoria. It is worth noting that they displayed none of the features of an upstart nobility, although the rural gentry, from whom they chiefly sprang, were, at that period,

often uncultivated and uncouth. When they came up from their estates they had no polished court, like that of Versailles, in which to learn fine manners. The only school for social education in the eighteenth century was to be found in the great political houses; for unlike what was happening in France, where society had nothing to do with the government of the country, the two terms were almost identical in England. Marriage was a mighty instrument in the career of the founders or improvers of the ruling families, and the entry by its means into a powerful cousinhood was the first step to fame and fortune of many a line of modest squires.

While the men, by their eloquence, were giving to the British parliament its imperishable renown, the women, by their intelligence and charm, were making English political society the most brilliant in Europe, when the Revolution had swept away the ancient court of France. Such a one was Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, whose beauty inspired the adoration of all who came beneath its spell, except her husband, from the greatest orator of his age to the rude electors of Westminster. Such was her grandchild, Harriet Duchess of Sutherland, who in close attendance on the young Queen at the Coronation, incarnated the grace and stateliness of the society about to pass away. This daughter of the Howards, by her qualities, brought to her husband a dowry even more desirable than did the heiresses who had handed the Leveson-Gowers to the summit of the peerage. In noble outline Sir Thomas Lawrence has preserved her gracious features as they appeared radiant in early motherhood. In classic phrase Mr Gladstone has graven on the marble of her monument at Trentham a reverential tribute to the memory of one who took with her to the tomb a

tradition of which he remained the last witness and of which he, in a certain sense, was the last inheritor.

It has been worth while to recall the personages by whom the Queen was surrounded when she assumed the crown to which she was to add fresh lustre after they had departed. By considering them and their antecedents, their social surroundings and their political influence, we can best realise the revolution which took place during the reign of Queen Victoria. It was inevitable that the governmental class should lose its exclusive prerogatives in the new age which we now see was inaugurated by her Coronation. But the persons composing it were worthy of having a regal ceremony in a royal Abbey for their last full-dress parade. Under their dispensation and that of their forerunners had been founded the British Empire, which the Queen, whom they had come to enthrone, was destined to aggrandise and, by her personal influence, to consolidate. Sometimes an error of policy had almost wrecked the Empire in its infancy, as when sovereign and statesmen combined to drive the American colonies from English rule, in spite of the patriotic foresight of Chatham. But on the whole much more was done to build up the Empire in the old days of slow and difficult communication, when politicians had some excuse not to understand the capabilities of the British race, than by the first generation of those who saw the change of things, yet did not recognise what its imperial significance might be. Nor was the governing class merely a society of selfish monopolists. In the annals of the reign of George III. it is remarkable how many projects are to be found of reforms proposed by members of the high political hierarchy, some of which the twentieth century waits for in vain. Such a reformer was the third Duke of Richmond, whose niece, the

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