CHAPTER XVIII. "Though an honorable title may be conveyed to posterity, yet the ennobling qualities which are the soul of greatness are a sort of incommunicable perfections, and cannot be transferred. If a man could bequeath his virtues by will and settle his sense and learning upon his heirs as certainly as he can his lands, a noble descent would then indeed be a valuable privilege." 1 "Fortune, good night; smile once more; turn thy wheel!" SHAKSPEARE. As to genealogy, or more particularly the subject to which it relates, if its application be directed to the questions daily arising on the breeding of stock, we may easily conceive the bearing it would have on improvement, but unless in human affairs we look at it in the light of deterioration by reason of unhealthy vincula, which a due regard to the maintenance of sound health would condemn, and thus get at the converse of the term, we confess to some difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that per se, it has anything to do with progress. If the hypothesis we recently advanced, which indeed to us is an axiom, be true, namely that the present public educational curriculum is, in its effect to place upon a higher level of society those factors who hitherto have gone to make up a whole in the maintenance of the public weal, then of course in generations to come the genealogical or perhaps more accurately the temporary social position, will have received one general move up, much after the fashion of the internal aspect of the hammers and keys of a pianoforte when the pedal of the instrument is pressed, perhaps to come down again as abruptly when the pressure is removed! But in what other way than that we have hinted at it is possible to argue that the enumeration of the ancestry or relations and alliances of a person or family, in either the direct line or the collateral, has anything to do with progress, we confess our inability to perceive. Doubtless a man of the present day who can trace back his personal descent to a Watt or an Arkwright would have reason more or less to feel proud of any distinction that particular circumstances might give him, but to our mind such a person so far as affects his lineage is infinitely inferior in contrast with the progeny whose pedigree dates from the prize bull we saw exhibited at the Smithfield cattle show many years ago, and whose stock is even now of the utmost value to his owner! We trust we are not too commercial in our views and that we do not offend the gentler senses of our readers by a simile lacking any degree of refinement but we are anxious to be truthful as well as simple. What after all is there in the fact of being the descendant of a man whose own genius rightly made him illustrious and who with justice might and probably did wear his own pride! There is but one light in which it could be of solid use and that is when the reward and accumulations crowning the distinguished services he has rendered either to mankind in general or his country in particular accompany the descent! What can it signify what a man's great grandfather was, now that the old party's great grandson is elevated to the Peerage! Shakspeare himself whose great monument is his works was a clerk in a country attorney's officeand Sir Richard Arkwright the great improver of cotton-spinning machinery to whom we have just alluded was brought up a barber, and moreover could scarcely write! Some of the noble lords who rank amongst the aristocracy of this Country if they revert to the creation of their patent will on some further research, come somewhat abruptly upon the days when easy shaving was а means of livelihood in their own little family! To many this may be surprising, but what substance is there in the objection, if objection there be? Yet a person in the investigation of his own origin -an extremely interesting operation by the way to those who have not already so exercised their reflective and comparative intelligence-may alight on such ancestral difficulties as may if he be deficient of moral courage, deter him however eminent from publishing his autobiography. The interpolation of the author of a bend sinister on the escutcheon may sometimes interfere with the brilliancy of the pedigree. The flushing of a common attorney here, a publican there, or indeed any calling from the village blacksmith or the like, to a hedge parson or an apothecary, all in their day perhaps. highly respected or respectable members of society, would be a scare too much for him. Or may be in that search he might accidentally drop upon some important link whose accumulations were acquired in some contraband-questionable manner-nay even on one who had been a malefactor. These also would be equally over-powering to him. Not so however does such scrupulous delicacy affect the freedom of the biographer, unless indeed he be obsequious, and the history be written during the lifetime of his subject, in which case a starting point in the 'stud-book' may be fixed upon, or an omission suitable to the convenience or moral susceptibilities of the party affected, may be made. Sometimes indeed both are done in ignorance or forgetfulness of the fact that there live scores of people who are much better acquainted with the circumstances than the biographer himself, whose production is then rendered ridiculous, and an inducement to the exalted to cry in lowly cadence 6 save me from my friends'! The shock however depends upon the proximity of the event, for remoteness. is often not regarded in these matters. Not very long ago we heard of a family in the Eastern or Western part of England, tho' it might have been in the Southern-whose heraldic emblem presented a gallows with a man's head and neck stretched through the pendent loop-the noose was not drawn tight. Oh, no!-The history of the affair so far as our memory serves us was this or something like it, and a very amusing one it is. An ancestor, we will term him the propositus one day heard the King express in an audible whisper, 'I would I were rid me of that cowardly worm'! The cowardly worm we should say was some other courtier, not the propositus-but it would seem that the propositus was one of that toadying, lickspittle kind of people who even in these days are found grovelling about their betters, and he without informing the King or indeed any one, of his intention, 'rapiered' the offensive courtier at a moment when that gentleman least expected it, and so rid his royal master of all further annoyances from that quarter. Contrary to his expectations however and much to his chagrin the reigning King to whom he quietly though exultingly announced the service he had performed, ordered him to be arrested and tried on the charge of wilful murder, and in due course he was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. His Majesty however had by this time begun to feel relieved by the absence of the 'cowardly worm' and commenced to relent, and think that the officious propositus had really done him a service. The result was that upon the day fixed for the execution, the King pardoned the malefactor, and by way of punishment and ridicule, made him with cutting sarcasm, a grant of arms with the crest as it is now worn by the family in question, who by the way are intensely proud of and neck on the verge of being it, the head strung strung up |