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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: men and women whom they felt to be their own flesh and blood, they
had, it may be, a juster appreciation of the actual worth of their
patrons than had our own Pitt and Burke. They had played the valet:
and no man was a hero to them. They had seen the nobleman expose
himself before his own helots: they would try if the helot was not
as good as the nobleman. The nobleman had played the mountebank:
why should not the mountebank, for once, play the nobleman? The
nobleman's God had been his five senses, with (to use Mr. Carlyle's
phrase) the sixth sense of vanity: why should not the mountebank
worship the same God, like Carriere at Nantes, and see what grace
and gifts he too might obtain at that altar?
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