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should all be noble; that when no man born under English sway, felt another
his superior in rank, courtesy and refinement would become the birth-right
of all our countrymen. Let not England be so far disgraced, as to have it
imagined that it can be without nobles, nature's true nobility, who bear
their patent in their mien, who are from their cradle elevated above the
rest of their species, because they are better than the rest. Among a race
of independent, and generous, and well educated men, in a country where the
imagination is empress of men's minds, there needs be no fear that we
should want a perpetual succession of the high-born and lordly. That party,
however, could hardly yet be considered a minority in the kingdom, who
extolled the ornament of the column, "the Corinthian capital of polished
society;" they appealed to prejudices without number, to old attachments
and young hopes; to the expectation of thousands who might one day become
peers; they set up as a scarecrow, the spectre of all that was sordid,
mechanic and base in the commercial republics.
The plague had come to Athens. Hundreds of English residents returned to
their own country. Raymond's beloved Athenians, the free, the noble people
of the divinest town in Greece, fell like ripe corn before the merciless
sickle of the adversary. Its pleasant places were deserted; its temples and
palaces were converted into tombs; its energies, bent before towards the
highest objects of human ambition, were now forced to converge to one
point, the guarding against the innumerous arrows of the plague.
At any other time this disaster would have excited extreme compassion among
us; but it was now passed over, while each mind was engaged by the coming
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