They are still thought to be greater and better.

The great offices, whether permanent or Parliamentary, which require mind now give social prestige, and almost only those.

A big grocer despises the exciseman; and what in many countries would be thought impossible, the exciseman envies the grocer.

Solid wealth tells where there is no artificial dignity given to petty public functions.

But they have no notion of PLAY of mind: no conception that the charm of society depends upon it.

They think cleverness an antic, and have a constant though needless horror of being thought to have any of it.

So much does this stiff dignity give the tone, that the few Englishmen capable of social brilliancy mostly secrete it.

But a good Government is well worth a great deal of social dulness.

The dignified torpor of English society is inevitable if we give precedence, not to the cleverest classes, but to the oldest classes, and we have seen how useful that is.

The social prestige of the aristocracy is, as every one knows, immensely less than it was a hundred years or even fifty years since.

The rise of industrial wealth in countless forms has brought in a competitor which has generally more mind, and which would be supreme were it not for awkwardness and intellectual gene.

But society is every day becoming less stately.

They suffer from the tendency of all modern society to raise the average, and to lower--comparatively, and perhaps absolutely, to lower--the summit.

As the picturesqueness, the featureliness, of society diminishes, aristocracy loses the single instrument of its peculiar power.

If we remember the great reverence which used to be paid to nobility as such, we shall be surprised that the House of Lords as an assembly, has always been inferior; that it was always just as now, not the first, but the second of our…

He was Prime Minister because he managed the House of Commons; he was turned out because he was beaten on an election petition in that House; he ruled England because he ruled that House.

A great part of the borough members and a great part of the county members were their nominees; an obedient, unquestioning deference was paid them.

As individuals the peers were the greatest people; as a House the collected peers were but the second House.

The House of Peers has never been a House where the most important peers were most important.

The qualities which fit a man for marked eminence, in a deliberative assembly, are not hereditary, and are not coupled with great estates.

In the nation, in the provinces, in his own province, a Duke of Devonshire, or a Duke of Bedford, was a much greater man than Lord Thurlow.

Till the House of Lords met, the dukes were not only the greatest, but immeasurably the greatest.

He could speak, and the others could not speak.

He could transact business in half an hour which they could not have transacted in a day, or could not have transacted at all.

The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.