Excerpt from A Second Series of Vicissitudes of Families - The jest at which fools laugh the loudest, The downfall of our old nobility - Which may forerun the ruin of a kingdom. I've seen an idiot clap his hands and shout To see a tower like yon stop to its base In headlong ruin; while the wise look'd round, And fearful sought a distant stance to watch What fragment of the fabric next should follow; For when the turrets fall, the walls are tottering. Walter Scott. The decadence of noble and wealthy families is a fact of too frequent occurrence to be now a subject of doubt or dispute, but the cause of such decadence, though equally obvious, seems to have puzzled a host of enquirers: the whole matter is referable to a few general agents. Historically considered, the decay and extinction of great Houses may be mainly attributed to the Civil Wars, from Hastings to Culloden, and to the law of attainder, which, in England more than in any other country of Europe, undermined and overthrew the landed Aristocracy. So fatal, indeed, was the operation of that law, that, of the twenty-five Barons who were appointed to enforce the observance of Magna Charta, there is not now in the House of Peers a single male descendant! About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.