bye-blows of kings must be signally unflattering. In England the Peerage is kept alive by incessant restorations and creations. One man, George iii., manufactured five hundred and twenty-two peers. An earldom, in abeyance for five centuries, has suddenly been assumed by some commoner, to whom it had not so much descended as through the art of the lawyers been made flexibly to bend in that direction. For not Thames is so sinuous in his natural course, not the Bridgwater Canal more artificially conducted, than blood in the veins of that winding or manufactured nobility. Perishable as stubble, and fungous as the fungi, those grafted families successively live and die on the eternal soil of a name. In England this day, twenty-five hundred peerages are extinct; but the names survive. So that the empty air of a name is more endurable than a man, or than dynasties of men; the air fills man's lungs and puts life into a man, but man fills not the air, nor puts life into that.
All honour to the names then, and all courtesy to the men; but if St. Albans tell me he is all-honourable and all-eternal, I must still politely refer him to Nell Gwynne.
Beyond Charles ii. very few indeed—hardly worthy of note—are the present titled English families which can trace anything like a direct unvitiated blood-descent from the thief knights of the Norman. Beyond Charles ii. their direct genealogies seem vain as though some Jew clothesman, with a tea-canister on his head, turned over the first chapter of St. Matthew to make out his unmingled participation in the blood of King Saul, who had long died ere the career of the Cæsar began.
Now, not preliminarily to enlarge upon the fact that, while in England an immense mass of state-masonry is brought to bear as a buttress in upholding the hereditary
