Note DW — LETTER XXXII.

The English aristocracy is accessible to every man of superior qualities. The king can and often does make a peer of a commoner, and the order of knights, which is the lowest degree of nobility, is essentially an aristocracy of talents and personal services, not being hereditary. But if the aristocracy of intellect has thus got a footing in the aristocracy of birth, the latter has also encroached upon the former; for with the constitution of the Anglican church, and in the absence of monasteries and the numerous gratuitous institutions of the olden time, it is more difficult for a swine-herd, like Sixtus V., to rise in the establishment at the present day, than it would have been for him to reach the summit of the Catholic hierarchy in the Middle Ages.