r. Robertson grew quite ruffled.

"Then you pride yourself on verisimilitude?" I suggested.

"As I think you may guess; and we spare no pains to attain it, whether
in the names or In the descriptions supplied to the newspapers.
'William Arbuthnot Blain, Esq.'--you have heard of Balzac's scouring
Paris for a name for one of his characters. I assure you I scoured
England for William Arbuthnot Blain--'identified with the movement
for improving the dwellings of the labouring classes'--or is that
Richard Farrant, Esq.? In any case, what more likely, on the face of
it? 'Frederick Wills, Esq., of the well-known tobacco firm of
Bristol'--the public swallows that readily: and yet it never buys a
packet of their Westward Ho! Mixture (which I smoke myself) without
reading that the Wills's of Bristol are W. D. and H. O.--no Frederick
at all."

"But," I urged, "the purpose of this--"

"I should have thought it obvious; but let me give you the history of
it. The practice began with William III. He was justly scornful of
the lax distribution of honours which had marked all the Stuart
reigns. You will hardly believe it, but before 1688 knighthoods, and
even peerages, went as often as not to men who qualified by an
opportune loan to the Exchequer, or even by presiding at a public
feast. (I say nothing of baronetcies, for their history is
notorious.) At first William was for making a clean sweep of the
Honours' List, or limiting it to two or three well-approved
recipients. But it was argued that this seeming niggardliness might
injure His Majesty's popularity, never quite secure. The Scutorium
found a way out of the dilemma. Sir Crofton Byng, the then Clerk of
the Ribands, proposed the scheme, which has worked ever since.
I may tell you that the undue _largesse_ of honours finds in the very
highest quarters as little favour as ever it did. Of course, there
are some whose services to science, literature, and art cannot be
ignored--the late Lord Leighton, for instance, or Sir George Newnes,
or Sir Joseph Lister again; and these are honoured, while the public
acclaims. But the rest are represented only in my collection of
masks--and an interesting one it is. Let me lead the way."

But I have left myself no space for describing the treasures of the
Sc