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- 371
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- Nature hath not so unbounded a sway. The grass is annually changed; but
the limbs of the oak, for a long term of years, defy that annual decree.
And if in America the vast mass of families be as the blades of grass,
yet some few there are that stand as the oak; which, instead of
decaying, annually puts forth new branches; whereby Time, instead of
subtracting, is made to capitulate into a multiple virtue.
In this matter we will--not superciliously, but in fair spirit--compare
pedigrees with England, and strange as it may seem at the first blush,
not without some claim to equality. I dare say, that in this thing the
Peerage Book is a good statistical standard whereby to judge her; since
the compilers of that work can not be entirely insensible on whose
patronage they most rely; and the common intelligence of our own people
shall suffice to judge us. But the magnificence of names must not
mislead us as to the humility of things. For as the breath in all our
lungs is hereditary, and my present breath at this moment, is further
descended than the body of the present High Priest of the Jews, so far
as he can assuredly trace it; so mere names, which are also but air, do
likewise revel in this endless descendedness. But if Richmond, and St.
Albans, and Grafton, and Portland, and Buccleugh, be names almost old as
England herself, the present Dukes of those names stop in their own
genuine pedigrees at Charles II., and there find no very fine fountain;
since what we would deem the least glorious parentage under the sun, is
precisely the parentage of a Buccleugh, for example; whose ancestress
could not well avoid being a mother, it is true, but had accidentally
omitted the preliminary rite. Yet a king was the sire. Then only so much
the worse; for if it be small insult to be struck by a pauper, but
mortal offense to receive a blow from a gentleman, then of all things
the 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 Bridgewater 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 honor to the names then, and all courtesy to the men; but if St.
Albans tell me he is all-honorable 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 any thing 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.
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