Note 3 — LETTER XLV.

‘Largesse.’ The French word is obsolete; one Latin equivalent, Liberalitas, is fast receiving another, and not altogether similar significance, among English Liberals. The other Latin equivalent, Generosity, has become doubly meaningless, since modern political economy and politics neither require virtue, nor breeding. The Greek, or Greek-descended, equivalents—Charity, Grace, and the like, your Grace the Duke of —— can perhaps tell me what has become of them. Meantime, of all the words, ‘Largesse,’ the entirely obsolete one, is the perfectly chivalric one; and therefore, next to the French description of Franchise, we will now read the French description of Largesse,—putting first, for comparison with it, a few more sentences3 from the secretary’s speech at the meeting of Social Science in Glasgow; and remembering also the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’s’ exposition of the perfection of Lord Derby’s idea of agriculture, in the hands of the landowner—“Cultivating” (by machinery) “large farms for himself.”