--yours and mine, colonel--disloyalty. Hark: "Where kings lead, it is to
be supposed they are wanted. Service is the noble office on earth, and
where kings do service let them take the first honours of the State:
but"--hark at this--"the English middle-class, which has absorbed the
upper, and despises, when it is not quaking before it, the lower, will
have nothing above it but a ricketty ornament like that you see on a
confectioner's twelfth-cake."'

'The man deserves hanging!' said Colonel Halkett.

'Further, my dear colonel, and Nevil marks it pretty much throughout:
"This loyalty smacks of a terrible perfidy. Pass the lords and squires;
they are old trees, old foundations, or joined to them, whether old or
new; they naturally apprehend dislocation when a wind blows, a river
rises, or a man speaks;--that comes of age or aping age: their hearts are
in their holdings! For the loyalty of the rest of the land, it is the
shopkeeper's loyalty, which is to be computed by the exact annual sum of
his net profits. It is now at high tide. It will last with the
prosperity of our commerce."--The insolent old vagabond!--"Let commercial
disasters come on us, and what of the loyalty now paying its hundreds of
thousands, and howling down questioners! In a day of bankruptcies, how
much would you bid for the loyalty of a class shivering under deprivation
of luxuries, with its God Comfort beggared? Ay, my Beauchamp,"--the most
offensive thing to me is that "my Beauchamp," but old Nevil has evidently
given himself up hand and foot to this ruffian--"ay, when you reflect
that fear of the so-called rabble, i.e. the people, the unmoneyed class,
which knows not Comfort, tastes not of luxuries, is the main component of
their noisy frigid loyalty, and that the people are not with them but
against, and yet that the people might be won by visible forthright
kingly service to a loyalty outdoing theirs as the sun the moon; ay, that