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The walls of the principal apartments were finely sculptured with fruit, foliage, and armorial bearings, and were hung with embroidered satin. Every trace of this magnificence has long disappeared; and no aristocratical mansion is to be found in that once aristocratical quarter.
All this, though it may not have been attended with any immediate pecuniary advantage, contributed to give Goldsmith's name and poetry the high stamp of fashion, so potent in England; the circle at Northumberland House, however, was of too stately and aristocratical a nature to be much to his taste, and we do not find that he became familiar in it.
Richardson had the not uncommon failing of the humble-born: he desired above all, and attempted too much, to depict the manners of the great; he had naive aristocratical leanings which account for his uncertain tread when he would move with ease among the boudoirs of Mayfair.
His reading was comprised in two volumes octavo, being the Memoirs of the Count de Grammont, which amusing and aristocratical work was never out of his hand. He had been many years at sea; but strange to say, knew nothing, literally nothing, of his profession. Seamanship, navigation, and every thing connected with the service, he was perfectly ignorant of.
The fact is, that almost all the governments that have ever existed in the civilised world have been, in part at least, monarchical and aristocratical. The first government constituted on principles approaching to those which the Utilitarians hold was, we think, that of the United States.
It is a curious fact, although little commented upon, how much society in general is affected by the entailment of property in aristocratical families upon the male heir; we may add, how much it is demoralised.
The clergy and the nobility were considerably agitated and not slightly alarmed; the latter fearing the resentment of the king for their avowed predilection in favor of Austria, and perceiving the destruction of every hope of aristocratical domination. The more elevated of the middle clases also saw an end to their exclusive occupation of magisterial and municipal employments.
But race hour approaches, and people begin to assemble in groups before the "rooms," while tax-carts, pony-gigs, post-chaises, the usual aristocratical accompaniments of Newmarket, come dribbling at intervals into the town.
At length, on prescribing to a lady of his acquaintance who, to use a hackneyed phrase, "rejoiced" in the aristocratical name of Sidebotham, a warm dispute arose between him and the apothecary as to the quantity of medicine to be administered. The doctor stood up for the rights and dignities of his profession, and resented the interference of the compounder of drugs.
The literary privileges once enjoyed by lords are as obsolete as their right to kill the king's deer on their way to Parliament, or as their old remedy of scandalum magnatum. Yet we must acknowledge that, though our political opinions are by no means aristocratical, we always feel kindly disposed towards noble authors.
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