these have their uses also, we do not deny. Respectable parentage is calculated to secure good manners, and to operate as an incentive to the practice of virtue. A nobleman naturally feels desirous of maintaining the dignity conventionally attached to his title, and of transmitting his escutcheon unsullied to his posterity. In the distinction to which he is exalted, society possesses a guarantee for his preservation of moral propriety and external decency. The forfeiture of his honour would render his name execrable, not only to the present generation, but to all his posterity for ages to come; and this fear must restrain him from violence and excess. And there is something enrapturing to the imagination in the thought of a noble family that has kept up its brilliancy for ages immemorial, and has passed unscathed the fiery trials of life, and escaped the desolating ravages of time. “It is a reverend thing,” says the master philosopher of modern times, “to see an ancient castle or building not in decay, or to see a fair timber tree sound and perfect; how much more to behold an ancient noble family which hath stood against the waves and weathers of time.”[1] We are no Vandals, and can admire the monuments and relics of antiquity as in inanimate productions of nature, art, and genius, so also in living families of title and distinction. When we meet with the sons of Benjamin and Judah among the Jews, or those of Sandilya and Kashyapa among the Brahmins, we feel transported to the age of prophecy in the one case and of poetry in the other.
Notwithstanding, however, these uses and associations, hereditary honours are subject, as we have already declared, to many serious abuses. Nothing can be a more sorry spectacle than the sight of empty conceits of dignity unadorned with the gifts of nature and fortune, and unaccompanied by the recommendations of talent and virtue. It was a just reproach of idle boasters of family distinction, which John the Baptist, on the banks of the Jordan, levelled against the haughty Pharisees and Sadducees that solicited his baptism, when calling them a generation of vipers, he declared the vanity of their descent from Abraham. The experience of many ages and countries has convinced mankind, that idle boasters of noble genealogies generally depart from the virtuous career of their distinguished ancestors, from whom they derive their names and titles—as far, indeed, and as widely as the Pharisees and Sadducees of St. John the Baptist’s time had degenerated from Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob.
The Brahminical Kuls which Bullal instituted contained
