which was certain, sooner or later, to produce decay and ruin. The old
Nobility of Europe was not a mere aristocracy. It was a caste: a race
not intermarrying with the races below it. It was not a mere
aristocracy. For that, for the supremacy of the best men, all societies
strive, or profess to strive. And such a true aristocracy may exist
independent of caste, or the hereditary principle at all. We may
conceive an Utopia, governed by an aristocracy which should be really
democratic; which should use, under developed forms, that method which
made the mediaeval priesthood the one great democratic institution of old
Christendom; bringing to the surface and utilising the talents and
virtues of all classes, even to the lowest. We may conceive an
aristocracy choosing out, and gladly receiving into its own ranks as
equals, every youth, every maiden, who was distinguished by intellect,
virtue, valour, beauty, without respect to rank or birth; and rejecting
in turn, from its own ranks, each of its own children who fell below some
lofty standard, and showed by weakliness, dulness, or baseness,
incapacity for the post of guiding and elevating their fellow-citizens.
Thus would arise a true aristocracy; a governing body of the really most
worthy--the most highly organised in body and in mind--perpetually
recruited from below: from which, or from any other ideal, we are yet a
few thousand years distant.

But the old Ancien Regime would have shuddered, did shudder, at such a
notion. The supreme class was to keep itself pure, and avoid all taint
of darker blood, shutting its eyes to the fact that some of its most
famous heroes had been born of such left-handed marriages as that of
Robert of Normandy with the tanner's daughter of Falaise. "Some are so
curious in this behalf," says quaint old Burton, writing about 1650, "as
these old Romans, our modern Venetians, Dutch, and French, that if two
parties dearly love, the one noble, the other ignoble, they may not, by