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- present titled English families which can trace any thing like a direct
unvitiated blood-descent from the thief knights of the Norman. Beyond
Charles II. their direct genealogies seem vain as though some Jew
clothesman, with a tea-canister on his head, turned over the first
chapter of St. Matthew to make out his unmingled participation in the
blood of King Saul, who had long died ere the career of the Cæsar began.
Now, not preliminarily to enlarge upon the fact that, while in England
an immense mass of state-masonry is brought to bear as a buttress in
upholding the hereditary existence of certain houses, while with us
nothing of that kind can possibly be admitted; and to omit all mention
of the hundreds of unobtrusive families in New England who,
nevertheless, might easily trace their uninterrupted English lineage to
a time before Charles the Blade: not to speak of the old and
oriental-like English planter families of Virginia and the South; the
Randolphs for example, one of whose ancestors, in King James' time,
married Pocahontas the Indian Princess, and in whose blood therefore an
underived aboriginal royalty was flowing over two hundred years ago;
consider those most ancient and magnificent Dutch Manors at the North,
whose perches are miles--whose meadows overspread adjacent
countries--and whose haughty rent-deeds are held by their thousand
farmer tenants, so long as grass grows and water runs; which hints of a
surprising eternity for a deed, and seem to make lawyer's ink
unobliterable as the sea. Some of those manors are two centuries old;
and their present patrons or lords will show you stakes and stones on
their estates put there--the stones at least--before Nell Gwynne the
Duke-mother was born, and genealogies which, like their own river,
Hudson, flow somewhat farther and straighter than the Serpentine
brooklet in Hyde Park.
These far-descended Dutch meadows lie steeped in a Hindooish haze; an
eastern patriarchalness sways its mild crook over pastures, whose tenant
flocks shall there feed, long as their own grass grows, long as their
own water shall run. Such estates seem to defy Time's tooth, and by
conditions which take hold of the indestructible earth seem to
contemporize their fee-simples with eternity. Unimaginable audacity of a
worm that but crawls through the soil he so imperially claims!
In midland counties of England they boast of old oaken dining-halls
where three hundred men-at-arms could exercise of a rainy afternoon, in
the reign of the Plantagenets. But our lords, the Patroons, appeal not
to the past, but they point to the present. One will show you that the
public census of a county is but part of the roll of his tenants. Ranges
of mountains, high as Ben Nevis or Snowdon, are their walls; and regular
armies, with staffs of officers, crossing rivers with artillery, and
marching through primeval woods, and threading vast rocky defiles, have
been sent out to distrain upon three thousand farmer-tenants of one
landlord, at a blow. A fact most suggestive two ways; both whereof shall
be nameless here.
But whatever one may think of the existence of such mighty lordships in
the heart of a republic, and however we may wonder at their thus
surviving, like Indian mounds, the Revolutionary flood; yet survive and
exist they do, and are now owned by their present proprietors, by as
good nominal title as any peasant owns his father's old hat, or any duke
his great-uncle's old coronet.
For all this, then, we shall not err very widely if we humbly conceive,
that--should she choose to glorify herself in that inconsiderable
way--our America will make out a good general case with England in this
short little matter of large estates, and long pedigrees--pedigrees I
mean, wherein is no flaw.
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