25 FEBRUARY 1978, Page 17

Nobility

Sir: Being noble in the only sense accepted by Mr Peregrine Worsthorne (4 February), Hilaire Belloc was too sensitive a realist to confuse this admirable virtue of nobility with that equally desirable phenomenon:

nobility of caste, of which he wrote that it 'is not as you vainly imagine, said I, in your crass suburban ignorance a mere inheritance of money for a whale sixty or seventy years but knowing who you are: a dimension in time appreciable to anyone who knows all about his four great-grandfathers and his four great-grandmothers: who they were and what they were in social habit and knows that they were all of his own kind and he of theirs. That is lineage, said I'.

(Dom) Peter Parent de Curzon, OSB Quaff Abbey, Ryde, Isle of Wight