place where Washington was said to have thrown a dollar across the
Potomac. The English friend expressed surprise; "but," said Mr. Evarts,
"you must remember that a dollar went further in those days." A Senator
met Mr. Evarts next day, and said that he had been amused by his jest.
"But," said Mr. Evarts, "I met a mere journalist just afterwards who
said, 'Oh, Mr. Evarts, you should have said that it was a small matter
to throw a dollar across the Potomac for a man who had chucked a
sovereign across the Atlantic.'" Mr. Evarts, weary of making many jokes,
would invent a journalist or other man and tell a story as his. It was
he who, on a kindly busybody expressing surprise at his daring to drink
so many different wines at dinner, said that it was only the indifferent
wines of which he was afraid.
It was Mr. Motley who said in Boston--"Give me the luxuries of life, and
I care not who has the necessaries."
Mr. Tom Appleton, famous for many witty sayings (among them the
well-known "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris"), heard some
grave city fathers debating what could be done to mitigate the cruel
east wind at an exposed corner of a certain street in Boston. He
suggested that they should tether a shorn lamb there.
A witty Bostonian going to dine with a lady was met by her with a face
of apology. "I could not get another man," she said; "and we are four
women, and you will have to take us all in to dinner." "Fore-warned is
four-armed," said he with a bow.
This gentleman was in a hotel in Boston when the law forbidding the sale
of liquor was in force. "What would you say," said an angry Bostonian,
"if a man from St. Louis, where they have freedom, were to come in and
ask you where he could get a drink?" Now it was known that spirits could
be clandestinely bought in a room under the roof, and the wit pointing
upwards replied, "I should say, 'Fils de St. Louis, montez au ciel.'"
Madame Apponyi was in London during the debates on the Reform Bill of
1867, and, like all foreigners and not a few Englishmen, was much
perplexed by the "Compound Householder," who figured so largely in the
discussion. Hayward explained that he was the Masculine of the Femme
Incomprise.
One of the best repartees ever made, because the briefest and the
justest, was made by "the gorgeous Lady Blessington" to Napoleon III.
When Prince Louis Napoleon was living in impecunious exile in London he
had been a constant guest at Lady Blessington's hospitable and brilliant
but Bohemian house. And she, when visiting Paris after the _coup d'état_
naturally expected to receive at the Tuileries some return for the
unbounded hospitalities of Gore House. Weeks passed, no invitation
arrived, and the Imperial Court took no notice of Lady Blessington's
presence. At length she encountered the Emperor at a great reception. As
he passed through the bowing and curtsying crowd, the Emperor caught
sight of his former hostess. "Ah, Miladi Blessington! Restez-vous
longtemps à Paris?" "Et vous, Sire?" History does not record the
usurper's reply.
Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter from 1830 to 1869, lived at a
beautiful villa near Torquay, and an enthusiastic lady who visited him
there burst into dithyrambics and cried, "What a lovely spot this is,
Bishop! It is so Swiss." "Yes, ma'am," blandly replied old Harry of
Exeter, "it is very Swiss; only there is no sea in Switzerland, and
there are no mountains here." To one of his clergy desiring to renew a
lease of some episcopal property, the Bishop named a preposterous sum as
the fine on renewal. The poor parson, consenting with reluctance, said,
"Well, I suppose it is better than endangering the lease, but certainly
your lordship has got the lion's share." "But, my dear sir, I am sure
you would not wish me to have that of the other creature."
Still, after all, for a bishop to score off a clergyman is an
inglorious victory; it is like the triumph of a magistrate over a
prisoner or of a don over an undergraduate. Bishop Wilberforce, whose
powers of repartee were among his most conspicuous gifts, was always
ready to use them where retaliation was possible--not in the safe
enclosure of the episcopal study, but on the open battlefield of the
platform and the House of Lords. At the great meeting in St. James's
Hall in the summer of 1868 to protest against the Disestablishment of
the Irish Church, some Orange enthusiast, in the hope of disturbing the
Bishop, kept interrupting his honeyed eloquence with inopportune shouts
of "Speak up, my lord." "I am already speaking up," replied the Bishop
in his most dulcet tone; "I always speak up; and I decline to speak down
to the level of the ill-mannered person in the gallery." Every one whose
memory runs back thirty years will recall the Homeric encounters between
the Bishop and Lord Chancellor Westbury in the House of Lords, and will
remember the melancholy circumstances under which Lord Westbury had to
resign his office. When he was leaving the Royal Closet after
surrendering the Great Seal into the Queen's hands, Lord Westbury met
the Bishop, who was going in to the Queen. It was a painful encounter,
and in reminding the Bishop of the occurrence when next they met,
Westbury said, "I felt inclined to say, 'Hast thou found me, O mine
enemy?'" The Bishop in relating this used to say, "I never in my life
was so tempted as to finish the quotation, and say, 'Yea, I have found
thee, because thou hast sold thyself to work iniquity.' But by a great
effort I kept it down, and said, 'Does your lordship remember the end of
the quotation?'" The Bishop, who enjoyed a laugh against himself, used
to say that he had once been effectually scored off by one of his clergy
whom he had rebuked for his addiction to fox-hunting. The Bishop urged
that it had a worldly appearance. The clergyman replied that it was not
a bit more worldly than a ball at Blenheim Palace at which the Bishop
had been present. The Bishop explained that he was staying in the house,
but was never within three rooms of the dancing. "Oh, if it comes to
that," replied the clergyman, "I never am within three fields of the
hounds."
One of the best replies--it is scarcely a repartee--traditionally
reported at Oxford was made by the great Saint of the Tractarian
Movement, the Rev. Charles Marriott. A brother-Fellow of Oriel had
behaved rather outrageously at dinner overnight, and coming out of
chapel next morning, essayed to apologize to Marriott: "My friend, I'm
afraid I made rather a fool of myself last night." "My dear fellow, I
assure you I observed nothing unusual."
In a former chapter about the Art of Conversation I referred to the
singular readiness which characterized Lord Sherbrooke's talk. A good
instance of it was his reply to the strenuous advocate of modern
studies, who, presuming on Sherbrooke's sympathy, said, "I have the
greatest contempt for Aristotle." "But not that contempt which
familiarity breeds, I should imagine," was Sherbrooke's mild rejoinder.
"I have got a box at the Lyceum to-night," I once heard a lady say, "and
a place to spare. Lord Sherbrooke, will you come? If you are engaged, I
must take the Bishop of Gibraltar." "Oh, that's no good. Gibraltar can
never be taken."
In 1872, when University College, Oxford, celebrated the thousandth
anniversary of its foundation, Lord Sherbrooke, as an old Member of the
College, made the speech of the evening. His theme was a complaint of
the iconoclastic tendency of New Historians. Nothing was safe from their
sacrilegious research. Every tradition, however venerable, however
precious, was resolved into a myth or a fable. "For example," he said,
"we have always believed that certain lands which this college owns in
Berkshire were given to us by King Alfred. Now the New Historians come
and tell us that this could not have been the case, because they can
prove that the lands in question never belonged to the King. It seems to
me that the New Historians prove too much--indeed, they prove the very
point which they contest. If the lands had belonged to the King, he
would probably have kept them to himself; but as they belonged to some
one else, he made a handsome present of them to the College."
Lord Beaconsfield's excellence in conversation lay rather in studied
epigrams than in impromptu repartees. But in his old electioneering
contests he used sometimes to make very happy hits. When he came
forward, a young, penniless, unknown coxcomb, to contest High Wycombe
against the dominating Whiggery of the Greys and the Carringtons, some
one in the crowd shouted, "We know all about Colonel Grey; but pray what
do you stand on?" "I stand on my head," was the prompt reply, to which
Mr. Gladstone always rendered unstinted admiration. At Aylesbury the
Radical leader had been a man of notoriously profligate life, and when
Mr. Disraeli came to seek re-election as Tory Chancellor of the
Exchequer this tribune of the people produced at the hustings the
Radical manifesto which Mr. Disraeli had issued twenty years before.
"What do you say to that, sir?" "I say that we all sow our wild oats,
and no one knows the meaning of that phrase better than you, Mr. ----."
A member of the diplomatic service at Rome in the old days of the
Temporal Power had the honour of an interview with Pio Nono. The Pope
graciously offered him a cigar--"I am told you will find this very
fine." The Englishman made that stupidest of all answers, "Thank your
Holiness, but I have no vices." "This isn't a vice; if it was you would
have it." Another repartee from the Vatican reached me a few years ago,
when the German Emperor paid his visit to Leo XIII. Count Herbert
Bismarck was in attendance on his Imperial master, and when they
reached the door of the Pope's audience-chamber the Emperor passed in,
and the Count tried to follow. A gentleman of the Papal Court motioned
him to stand back, as there must be no third person at the interview
between the Pope and the Emperor. "I am Count Herbert Bismarck," shouted
the German, as he struggled to follow his master. "That," replied the
Roman, with calm dignity, "may account for, but it does not excuse, your
conduct."
But, after all these "fash'nable fax and polite annygoats," as Thackeray
would have called them, after all these engaging courtesies of kings and
prelates and great ladies, I think that the honours in the way of
repartee rest with the little Harrow boy who was shouting himself hoarse
in the jubilation of victory after an Eton and Harrow match at Lord's in
which Harrow had it hollow. To him an Eton boy, of corresponding years,
severely observed, "Well, you Harrow fellows needn't be so beastly
cocky. When you wanted a Head Master you had to come to Eton to get
one." The small Harrovian was dumfounded for a moment, and then, pulling
himself together for a final effort of deadly sarcasm, exclaimed, "Well,
at any rate, no one can say that we ever produced a Mr. Gladstone."
XX.
TITLES.
The List of Honours, usually published on Her Majesty's Birthday, is
this year[23] reserved till the Jubilee Day, and to sanguine aspirants I
would say, in Mrs. Gamp's immortal words, "Seek not to proticipate."
Such a list always contains food for the reflective mind, and some of
the thoughts which it suggests may even lie too deep for tears. Why is
my namesake picked out for knighthood, while I remain hidden in my
native obscurity? Why is my rival made a C.B., while I "go forth
Companionless" to meet the chances and the vexations of another year?
But there is balm in Gilead. If I have fared badly, my friends have done
little better. Like Mr. Squeers, when Bolder's father was two pound ten
short, they have had their disappointments to contend against. A., who
was so confident of a peerage, is fobbed off with a baronetcy; and B.,
whose labours for the Primrose League entitled him to expect the Bath,
finds himself grouped with the Queen's footmen in the Royal Victorian
Order. As, when Sir Robert Peel declined to form a Government in 1839,
"twenty gentlemen who had not been appointed Under Secretaries for State
moaned over the martyrdom of young ambition," so during the first
fortnight of 1897 at least that number of middle-aged self-seekers came
to the regretful conclusion that Lord Salisbury was not sufficiently a
man of the world for his present position, and inwardly asked why a
judge or a surgeon should be preferred before a company-promoter or a
party hack. And, while feeling is thus fermenting at the base of the
social edifice, things are not really tranquil at the summit.
It is not long since the chief of the princely House of Duff was raised
to the first order of the peerage, and one or two opulent earls,
encouraged by his example, are understood to be looking upward. Every
constitutional Briton, whatever his political creed, has in his heart of
hearts a wholesome reverence for a dukedom. Lord Beaconsfield, who
understood these little traits of our national character even more
perfectly than Thackeray, says of his favourite St. Aldegonde (who was
heir to the richest dukedom in the kingdom) that "he held extreme
opinions, especially on political affairs, being a Republican of the
reddest dye. He was opposed to all privilege, and indeed to all orders
of men except dukes, who were a necessity." That is a delicious touch.
St. Aldegonde, whatever his political aberrations, "voiced" the
universal sentiment of his less fortunate fellow-citizens; nor can the
most soaring ambition of the British Matron desire a nobler epitaph than
that of the lady immortalized by Thomas Ingoldsby:--
"She drank prussic acid without any water,
And died like a Duke-and-a-Duchess's daughter."
As, according to Dr. Johnson, all claret would be port if it could, so,
presumably, every marquis would like to be a duke; and yet, as a matter
of fact, that Elysian translation is not often made. A marquis, properly
regarded, is not so much a nascent duke as a magnified earl. A shrewd
observer of the world once said to me: "When an earl gets a marquisate,
it is worth a hundred thousand pounds in hard money to his family." The
explanation of this cryptic utterance is that, whereas an earl's younger
sons are "misters," a marquis's younger sons are "lords." Each "my
lord" can make a "my lady," and therefore commands a distinctly higher
price in the marriage-market of a wholesomely-minded community. Miss
Higgs, with her fifty thousand pounds, might scorn the notion of
becoming the Honourable Mrs. Percy Popjoy; but as Lady Magnus Charters
she would feel a laudable ambition gratified.
An earldom is, in its combination of euphony, antiquity, and
association, perhaps the most impressive of all the titles in the
peerage. Most rightly did the fourteenth Earl of Derby decline to be
degraded into a brand-new duke. An earldom has always been the right of
a Prime Minister who wishes to leave the Commons. In 1880 a member of
the House of Russell (in which there are certain Whiggish traditions of
jobbery) was fighting a hotly contested election, and his ardent
supporters brought out a sarcastic placard--"Benjamin, Earl of
Beaconsfield! He made himself an earl and the people poor"; to which a
rejoinder was instantly forthcoming--"John, Earl Russell! He made
himself an earl and his relations rich." The amount of truth in the two
statements was about equal. In 1885 this order of the peerage missed the
greatest distinction which fate is likely ever to offer it, when Mr.
Gladstone declined the earldom proffered by her Majesty on his
retirement from office. Had he accepted, it was understood that the
representatives of the last Earl of Liverpool would have waived their
claims to the extinct title, and the greatest of the Queen's Prime
Ministers would have borne the name of the city which gave him birth.
But, magnificent and euphonious as an earldom is, the children of an
earl are the half-castes of the peerage. The eldest son is "my lord,"
and his sisters are "my lady;" and ever since the days of Mr. Foker,
Senior, it has been _de rigueur_ for an opulent brewer to marry an
earl's daughter; but the younger sons are not distinguishable from the
ignominious progeny of viscounts and barons. Two little boys,
respectively the eldest and the second son of an earl, were playing on
the front staircase of their home, when the eldest fell over into the
hall below. The younger called to the footman who picked his brother up,
"Is he hurt?" "Killed, _my lord_," was the instantanteous reply of a
servant who knew the devolution of a courtesy title.
As the marquises people the debatable land between the dukes and the
earls, so do the viscounts between the earls and the barons. A child
whom Matthew Arnold was examining in grammar once wrote of certain words
which he found it hard to classify under their proper parts of speech
that they were "thrown into the common sink, which is adverbs." I hope I
shall not be considered guilty of any disrespect if I say that
ex-Speakers, ex-Secretaries of State, successful generals, and ambitious
barons who are not quite good enough for earldoms, are "thrown into the
common sink, which is viscounts." Not only heralds and genealogists, but
every one who has the historic sense, must have felt an emotion of
regret when the splendid title of twenty-third Baron Dacre was merged by
Mr. Speaker Brand in the pinchbeck dignity of first Viscount Hampden.
After viscounts, barons. The baronage of England is headed by the
bishops; but, as we have already discoursed of those right reverend
peers, we, Dante-like, will not reason of them, but pass on--only
remarking, as we pass, that it is held on good authority that no human
being ever experiences a rapture so intense as an American bishop from a
Western State when he first hears himself called "My lord" at a London
dinner-party. After the spiritual barons come the secular barons--the
"common or garden" peers of the United Kingdom. Of these there are
considerably more than three hundred; and of all, except some thirty or
forty at the most, it may be said without offence that they are products
of the opulent Middle Class. Pitt destroyed deliberately and for ever
the exclusive character of the British peerage when, as Lord
Beaconsfield said, he "created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it
with the patrician oligarchy." And in order to gain admission to this
"plebeian aristocracy" men otherwise reasonable and honest will spend
incredible sums, undergo prodigious exertions, associate themselves with
the basest intrigues, and perform the most unblushing tergiversations.
Lord Houghton told me that he said to a well-known politician who
boasted that he had refused a peerage: "Then you made a great mistake. A
peerage would have secured you three things that you are much in need
of--social consideration, longer credit with your tradesmen, and better
marriages for your younger children."
It is unlucky that a comparatively recent change has put it out of the
power of a Prime Minister to create fresh Irish peers, for an Irish
peerage was a cheap and convenient method of rewarding political
service.[24] Lord Palmerston held that, combining social rank with
eligibility to the House of Commons, it was the most desirable
distinction for a politician. Pitt, when his banker Mr. Smith (who lived
in Whitehall) desired the privilege of driving through the Horse Guards,
said: "No, I can't give you that; but I will make you an Irish peer;"
and the banker became the first Lord Carrington.
What is a Baronet? ask some. Sir Wilfrid Lawson (who ought to know)
replies that he is a man "who has ceased to be a gentleman and has not
become a nobleman." But this is too severe a judgment. It breathes a
spirit of contempt bred of familiarity, which may, without irreverence,
be assumed by a member of an exalted Order, but which a humble outsider
would do well to avoid. As Major Pendennis said of a similar
manifestation, "It sits prettily enough on a young patrician in early
life, though, nothing is so loathsome among persons of our rank." I
turn, therefore, for an answer to Sir Bernard Burke, who says: "The
hereditary Order of Baronets was created by patent in England by King
James I. in 1611. At the institution many of the chief estated gentlemen
of the kingdom were selected for the dignity. The first batch of
Baronets comprised some of the principal landed proprietors among the
best-descended gentlemen of the kingdom, and the list was headed by a
name illustrious more than any other for the intellectual pre-eminence
with which it is associated--the name of Bacon. The Order of Baronets is
scarcely estimated at its proper value."
I cannot help feeling that this account of the baronetage, though
admirable in tone and spirit, and actually pathetic in its closing touch
of regretful melancholy, is a little wanting in what the French would
call "actuality." It leaves out of sight the most endearing, because the
most human, trait of the baronetage--its pecuniary origin. On this point
let us hear the historian Hume--"The title of Baronet was sold and two
hundred patents of that species of knighthood were disposed of for so
many thousand pounds." This was truly epoch-making. It was one of those
"actions of the just" which "smell sweet and blossom in the dust." King
James's baronets were the models and precursors of all who to the end of
time should traffic in the purchase of honours. Their example has
justified posterity, and the precedent which they set is to-day the
principal method by which the war-chests of our political parties are
replenished.
Another authority, handling the same high theme, tells us that the
rebellion in Ulster gave rise to this Order, and "it was required of
each baronet on his creation to pay into the Exchequer as much as would
maintain thirty soldiers three years at eight-pence a day in the
province of Ulster," and, as a historical memorial of their original
service, the baronets bear as an augmentation to their coats-of-arms
the royal badge of Ulster--a Bloody Hand on a white field. It was in apt
reference to this that a famous Whip, on learning that a baronet of his
party was extremely anxious to be promoted to the peerage, said, "You
can tell Sir Peter Proudflesh, with my compliments, that we don't do
these things for nothing. If he wants a peerage, he will have to put his
Bloody Hand into his pocket."
For the female mind the baronetage has a peculiar fascination. As there
was once a female Freemason, so there was once a female baronet--Dame
Maria Bolles, of Osberton, in the County of Nottingham. The rank of a
baronet's wife is not unfrequently conferred on the widow of a man to
whom a baronetcy had been promised and who died too soon to receive it.
"Call me a vulgar woman!" screamed a lady once prominent in society when
a good-natured friend repeated a critical comment. "Call me a vulgar
woman! me, who was Miss Blank, of Blank Hall, and if I had been a boy
should have been a baronet!"
The baronets of fiction are, like their congeners in real life, a
numerous and a motley band. Lord Beaconsfield described, with a
brilliancy of touch which was all his own, the labours and the
sacrifices of Sir Vavasour Firebrace on behalf of the Order of Baronets
and the privileges wrongfully withheld from them. "They are evidently
the body destined to save this country; blending all sympathies--the
Crown, of which they are the peculiar champions: the nobles, of whom
they are the popular branch; the people, who recognize in them their
natural leaders.... Had the poor King lived, we should at least have had
the Badge," added Sir Vavasour mournfully.
"The Badge?"
"It would have satisfied Sir Grosvenor le Draughte; he was for
compromise. But, confound him, his father was only an accoucheur."