simply inherited their status, and who, if personal merits happened to be originally in their case, accounted themselves all the higher in rank the further they were removed from such originating and raw personality.
Here, then, was a royal medley of rank, which, with every succeeding year, was less in accord with the common-sense of the day, and beginning at last to be suggestive of the ludicrous. The greatest intellects and chief moving spirits of the time stood in the same rank with nobodies; or the latter, as it chanced, might be the men of rank, and the former not. When these former began very generally to decline to enter such indiscriminate company, the time had come for sweeping away the entire old fabric. A great national order of merit was instituted in its place, whose positions were the fruit solely of personal qualities and deeds, and whose gradations constituted the sole public rank of the country. And, again, when the progress in countries outside of us, taking the same direction as our own, had also followed us in the like new institution of public rank, there succeeded an international agreement, by which the great minds of each country were marshalled forth into international prominence, and were thus constituted into an international nobility.
