France has not levelled, it has exalted. It has put down the dwarf, to set up the man. The punyism of a senseless word like Duke, Count or Earl has ceased to please. Even those who possessed them have disowned the gibberish, 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. Whether they mean strength or weakness, wisdom or folly, a child or a man, or the rider or the horse, is all equivocal. 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.