are associated with its mere name. Casa Borghese thinks so and so, Casa
Colonna has diametrically opposite views, while Casa Altieri may differ
wholly from both; and in connection with most subjects the mere names
Borghese, Altieri, Colonna, are associated in the minds of Romans of all
classes with distinct sets of principles and ideas, with distinct types
of character, and with distinctly different outward and visible signs of
race. Some of these conditions exist among the nobility of other
countries, but not, I believe, to the same extent. In Germany, the
aristocratic body takes a certain uniform hue, so to speak, from the
army, in which it plays so important a part, and the patriarchal system
is broken up by the long absences from the ancestral home of the
soldier-sons. In France, the main divisions of republicans, monarchists,
and imperialists have absorbed and unified the ideas and principles of
large bodies of families into bodies politic. In England, the practice of
allowing younger sons to shift for themselves, and the division of the
whole aristocracy into two main political parties, destroy the
patriarchal spirit; while it must also be remembered, that at a period
when in Italy the hand of every house was against its neighbour, and the
struggles of Guelph and Ghibelline were but an excuse for the prosecution
of private feuds, England was engaged in great wars which enlisted vast
bodies of men under a common standard for a common principle. Whether
the principle involved chanced to be that of English domination in
France, or whether men flocked to the standards of the White Rose of York
or the Red Rose of Lancaster, was of little importance; the result was
the same,--the tendency of powerful families to maintain internecine
traditional feuds was stamped out, or rather was absorbed in the
maintenance of the perpetual feud between the great principles of Tory
and Whig--of the party for the absolute monarch, and the party for the
freedom of the people.