and as they outgrew the
rickets, have despised the rattle. The genuine mind of man, thirsting
for its native home, society, contemns the gewgaws that separate him
from it. Titles are like circles drawn by the magician's wand, to
contract the sphere of man's felicity. He lives immured within the
Bastille of a word, and surveys at a distance the envied life of man.

Is it, then, any wonder that titles should fall in France? Is it not a
greater wonder that they should be kept up anywhere? What are they? What
is their worth, and "what is their amount?" When we think or speak of
a Judge or a General, we associate with it the ideas of office and
character; we think of gravity in one and bravery in the other; but when
we use the word merely as a title, no ideas associate with it. Through
all the vocabulary of Adam there is not such an animal as a Duke or a
Count; neither can we connect any certain ideas with the words. Whether
they mean strength or weakness, wisdom or folly, a child or a man, or
the rider or the horse, is all equivocal. What respect then can be paid
to that which describes nothing, and which means nothing? Imagination
has given figure and character to centaurs, satyrs, and down to all
the fairy tribe; but titles baffle even the powers of fancy, and are a
chimerical nondescript.

But this is not all. If a whole country is disposed to hold them in
contempt, all their value is gone, and none will own them. It is
common opinion only that makes them anything, or nothing, or worse
than nothing. There is no occasion to take titles away, for they take
themselves away when society concurs to ridicule them. This species of
imaginary consequence has visibly declined in every part of Europe, and
it hastens to its exit as the world of reason continues to rise. There
was a time when the lowest class of what are called nobility was more
thought of than the highest is now, and when a man in armour riding
throughout Christendom in quest of adventures was more stared at than
a modern Duke. The world has seen this folly fall, and it has fallen
by being laughed at, and the farce of titles will follow its fate. The
patriots of France have discovered in good time that rank and dignity in
society must take a new ground. The old one has fallen through. It must
now take the substantial ground of character, instead of the chimerical
ground of titles; and they have brought their titles to the altar, and
made of them a burnt-offering t