Morals had changed, manners had changed, men had become monkeys twice-removed, God had become Mammon⁠—Mammon so respectable as to deceive himself: Sixty-four years that favoured property, and had made the upper-middle class; buttressed, chiselled, polished it, till it was almost indistinguishable in manners, morals, speech, appearance, habit, and soul from the nobility. An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money, he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonised hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be. A great Age, whose transmuting influence nothing had escaped save the nature of man and the nature of the Universe.