The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 | Page 5

descended from the worthy. I did
expect to see the day, and, although I shall not see it, it must come at
last, when he shall be treated as a madman or an impostor who dares to
claim nobility or precedency, and cannot show his family name in the
history of his country. Even he who can show it, and who cannot write
his own under it in the same or as goodly characters, must submit to the
imputation of degeneracy, from which the lowly and obscure are
exempt." Good old Penn, too, is made a lay figure upon which Landor
dressed his thoughts, when the Quaker tells Lord Peterborough: "Of all
pride, however, and all folly, the grossest is where a man who
possesses no merit in himself shall pretend to an equality with one who
does possess it, and shall found this pretension on no better plea or title
than that, although he hath it not, his grandfather had. I would use no
violence or coercion with any rational creature; but, rather than that
such a bestiality in a human form should run about the streets uncured,
I would shout like a stripling for the farrier at his furnace, and unthong
the drenching horn from my stable-door." Landor could write his name
under that of his family in as goodly characters, therefore he was not
ashamed to relate anecdotes of his forefathers. It was with honest
satisfaction that he perpetuated the memory of two of these worthies in
the "Imaginary Conversations" between King Henry IV. and Sir Arnold
Savage, and Oliver Cromwell and Walter Noble. "Sir Arnold,
according to Elsynge, 'was the first who appears upon any record' to
have been appointed to the dignity of Speaker in the House of
Commons, as now constituted. He was elected a second time, four
years afterwards, a rare honor in earlier days; and during this
presidency he headed the Commons, and delivered their resolutions in
the plain words recorded by Hakewell." These "plain words" were, that
no subsidy should be granted to Henry IV. until every cause of public
grievance had been removed. Landor came rightly by his independence
of thought. "Walter Noble represented the city of Lichfield; he lived

familiarly with the best patriots of the age, remonstrated with Cromwell,
and retired from public life on the punishment of Charles."
Landor was very fond of selecting the grand old Roundheads for his
conversations. In their society he was most at home, and with them he
was able to air his pet opinions. Good Andrew Marvell, a man after the
author's own heart, discourses upon this matter of family: "Between the
titled man of ancient and the titled man of recent date, the difference, if
any, is in favor of the last. Suppose them both raised for merit, (here,
indeed, we do come to theory!) the benefits that society has received
from him are nearer us.... Some of us may look back six or seven
centuries, and find a stout ruffian at the beginning." In England, where
the institutions are such that a title of nobility is considered by the
majority to be the highest reward attainable by merit, it is not surprising
that the great god of Rank should be worshipped at the family altar of
Form. In England, too, it must be acknowledged that men of rank are
men of education, frequently of culture, and are useful to the nation as
patrons of art and of science; therefore nobility frequently means
absolute gentility. But in America what good can be said of those who,
living upon the fortunes of fathers or grandfathers, amassed in honest
trade,--residents of a particular street which is thereby rendered
pluperfectly genteel,--with no recommendation but that derived from
fashion and idleness,--draw the lines of social demarcation more
closely than they are drawn in Europe, intellect and accomplishments
being systematically snubbed where the possessors cannot show their
family passes? Is not this attempt to graft the foibles of an older and
more corrupt civilization upon our institutions, a disgrace to
republicanism? Were the truth known, we should be able to report the
existence of many advocates of monarchy, a privileged class, and an
established church, among those into whose ancestry it would be
unsafe to dig deeper than a second generation; by digging deeper we
might touch sugar or tumble into a vat of molasses, and then what
blushes for false pride!
A very different idea of a great man from that of the vulgar do we get
out of Landor's writings. His Diogenes tells us, (and very like the
original seeker after honesty do we take him to be,) that "the great man

is he who hath nothing to fear and nothing to hope from another. It is
he who, while he demonstrates the iniquity of