Why, dear me, _any_ kind of royalty, howsoever modified, _any_ kind of
aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born
and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it
out for yourself, and don’t believe it when somebody else tells you. It
is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of
froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or
reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its
aristocracies—a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would
have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to
their own exertions.