them?

They are like the snows of yester-year! They have gone the way of
their beautiful chariots with the elaborate armorial bearings and the
tasselled hammercloth, the bewigged, cocked-hatted coachman, and the
two gorgeous flunkies hanging on behind. Sir Gorgeous Midas has beaten
the dukes in mere gorgeousness, flunkies and all--burlesqued the
vulgar side of them, and unconsciously shamed it out of existence;
made swagger and ostentation unpopular by his own evil
example--actually improved the manners of the great by sheer mimicry
of their defects. He has married his sons and his daughters to them
and spoiled the noble curve of those lovely noses that Leech drew so
well, and brought them down a peg in many ways, and given them a new
lease of life; and he has enabled us to discover that they are not of
such different clay from ourselves after all. All the old slavish
formulae of deference and respect--"Your Grace," "Your Ladyship," "My
Lord"--that used to run so glibly off our tongues whenever we had a
chance, are now left to servants and shopkeepers; and my slight
experience of them, for one, is that they do not want to be toadied a
bit, and that they are very polite, well-bred, and most agreeable
people.

If we may judge of our modern aristocracy by that very slender
fragment of our contemporary fiction, mostly American, that still
thinks it worth writing about, our young noble of to-day is the most
good-humoured, tolerant, simple-hearted, simple-minded,
unsophisticated creature alive--thinking nothing of his
honours--prostrate under the little foot of some fair Yankee, who is
just as likely as not to jilt him for some transatlantic painter not
yet known to fame.