Publisher's Synopsis
There are as many social degrees in the peerage as there are in the middle and lower classes. There are barons who are greater noblemen than earls, viscounts who are welcomed in a society that some marquises can never hope to enter-it is a question not of wealth or celebrity, but of family relationships and date of creation. When, however, a man is a duke in England, his state is so lofty, he is so inevitably apart from every one else that these remarks hardly apply at all. Yet even in dukedoms one recognises there are degrees. There are royal dukes, stately figureheads moving in the brilliant light which pours from the throne, and generally a little obscured by its refulgence. These have their own serene place and being. There are the political dukes, Cabinet-made, who are solemnly caricatured through two generations of Punch, massive, Olympian, and generally asleep on the front benches of the House of Lords.
