18	ENGLISH    SAGA
and quite unconscious, was the distinguishing mark of the race.
Even at its worst—and sometimes in men like the Marquis of
Hertford, Thackeray's Lord Steyne and Disraeli's Monmouth, it
was very bad indeed—the standard of that aristocracy was bound
up with a sense of noblesse oblige. They were landowners and
they were hereditary legislators, and as both they had traditional
duties to perform which they felt they could not leave undone
without shaming themselves and their caste, " The Duke of
Rutland," wrote Greville, "is as selfish a man as any of his class
—that is, he never does what he does not like, and spends his
whole life in a round of such pleasures as suits his taste, but he
5s neither a foolish nor a bad man ; and partly from a sense of
jduty, partly from inclination, he devotes time and labour to
the interest and welfare of the people who live and labour
on his estate. He is a Guardian of a very large Union, and he
not only attends regularly the meetings of the Poor Law Guard-
ians every week or fortnight, and takes an active part in their
proceedings, but he visits those paupers who receive out-of-door
relief, sits and converses with them, invites them to complain to
him if they have anything to complain of, and tells them that
he is not only their friend but their representative at the
assembly of Guardians, and it is his duty to see that they are
nourished and protected." His fellow Duke of Richmond made
it his business to visit the sick room of the Workhouse of which
he was Guardian when cholera and typhus were raging among
the inmates: he had been in the army, he said, and did not fear
these contagions.
The English aristocracy and the country gentry ruled by
virtue of the fact that they were the focus on which the national
society centred- Wherever they were so—in the village, in the
small country town, in London—their position seemed strong
and assured. Wherever that focus was lacking—in the great
industrial cities and on the absentee estates of dispossessed Ireland
—aristocracy was already in eclipse and decay. But it still kept
a substantial measure of its ancient hold on the mind of England.
In its salons in London the intelligentsia were still welcome:
middle-class Mr. Macaulay might talk like ten parrots and a
chime of bells but he took his place by right of intellect among
the beeches and princely patronage of Bowood and ijm the rooms
of Holland House. "The world has never seen, and never will
see again," wrote Greville, "anything like Holland House," In