le 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, successfu