of honorable industry. In olden times, the
wealth and commerce of London, conducted as it was by energetic and
enterprising men was a prolific source of peerages. Thus, the earldom
of Cornwallis was founded by Thomas Cornwallis, the Cheapside merchant;
that of Essex by William Capel, the draper; and that of Craven by
William Craven, the merchant tailor. The modern Earl of Warwick is not
descended from 'the King-maker,' but from William Greville, the
woolstapler; whilst the modern Dukes of Northumberland find their head,
not in the Percies, but in Hugh Smithson, a respectable London
apothecary. The founders of the families of Dartmouth, Radnor, Ducie,
and Pomfret were respectively a skinner, a silk manufacturer, a merchant
tailor, and a Calais merchant; whilst the founders of the peerages of
Tankerville, Dormer, and Coventry were mercers. The ancestors of Earl
Romney, and Lord Dudley and Ward, were goldsmiths and jewelers; and Lord
Dacres was a banker in the reign of Charles I., as Lord Overstone is in
that of Queen Victoria. Edward Osborne, the founder of the dukedom of
Leeds, was apprentice to William Hewet, a rich cloth worker on London
Bridge, whose only daughter he courageously rescued from drowning, by
leaping into the Thames after her, and eventually married. Among other
peerages founded by trade are those of Fitzwilliam, Leigh, Petre,
Cowper, Darnley, Hill, and Carrington."

Perhaps the imaginary house of Tresham may be said to find its closest
counterpart in the Sidney family, for many generations owners of
Penshurst, and with a traditional character according to which the men
were all brave and the women were all pure. Sir Philip Sidney was
himself the type of all the virtues of the family, while his father's
care for his proper bringing up was not unlike Tresham's for Mildred. In
the words of a recent writer: "The most famous scion of this Kentish
house was above all things, the moral and intellectual product of
Penshurst Place. In the park may still be seen an avenue of trees, under
which the father, in his afternoon walks with the boy, tested his
recollection of the morning's lessons conned with the tutor. There, too,
it was that he impressed on the lad those maxims for the conduct of
life, afterwards emphasized in the correspondence still extant among the
Penshurst archives.

"Philip was to begin every day with lifting up his mind to the Almighty
in hearty prayer, as well as feelingly digesting all he pra