ed his offer,
enjoining that the Doctor would forward it to America. But as the Doctor
neither did this, nor yet sent him an answer, the projector wrote a
second letter, in which he did not, it is true, threaten to go over and
conquer America, but only with great dignity proposed that if his offer
was not accepted, an acknowledgment of about L30,000 might be made to
him for his generosity! Now, as all arguments respecting succession must
necessarily connect that succession with some beginning, Mr. Burke's
arguments on this subject go to show that there is no English origin of
kings, and that they are descendants of the Norman line in right of the
Conquest. It may, therefore, be of service to his doctrine to make this
story known, and to inform him, that in case of that natural extinction
to which all mortality is subject, Kings may again be had from Normandy,
on more reasonable terms than William the Conqueror; and consequently,
that the good people of England, at the revolution of 1688, might have
done much better, had such a generous Norman as this known their wants,
and they had known his. The chivalric character which Mr. Burke so much
admires, is certainly much easier to make a bargain with than a hard
dealing Dutchman. But to return to the matters of the constitution: The
French Constitution says, There shall be no titles; and, of consequence,
all that class of equivocal generation which in some countries is called
"aristocracy" and in others "nobility," is done away, and the peer is
exalted into the Man.

Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title. The thing is
perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the
human character, which degrades it. It reduces man into the diminutive
of man in things which are great, and the counterfeit of women in things
which are little. It talks about its fine blue ribbon like a girl, and
shows its new garter like a child. A certain writer, of some antiquity,
says: "When I was a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a
man, I put away childish things."

It is, properly, from the elevated mind of France that the folly of
titles has fallen. It has outgrown the baby clothes of Count and Duke,
and breeched itself in manhood. France has not levelled, it has exalted.
It has put down the dwarf, to set up the man. The punyism of a senseless
word like Duke, Count or Earl has ceased to please. Even those who
possessed them have disowned the gibberish,