k of affected surprise, and
modestly remind you that baronetcies only dated from James I. He
would gently sigh if you spoke of the blood of the Fitzgeralds and De
Burghs; would hardly allow the claims of the Howards and Lowthers;
and has before now alluded to the Talbots as a family who had hardly
yet achieved the full honours of a pedigree.

In speaking once of a wide-spread race whose name had received
the honours of three coronets, scions from which sat for various
constituencies, some one of whose members had been in almost every
cabinet formed during the present century, a brilliant race such as
there are few in England, Mr. Thorne had called them all "dirt."
He had not intended any disrespect to these men. He admired them
in many senses, and allowed them their privileges without envy. He
had merely meant to express his feeling that the streams which ran
through their veins were not yet purified by time to that perfection,
had not become so genuine an ichor, as to be worthy of being called
blood in the genealogical sense.

When Mr. Arabin was first introduced to him, Mr. Thorne had
immediately suggested that he was one of the Arabins of Uphill
Stanton. Mr. Arabin replied that he was a very distant relative
of the family alluded to. To this Mr. Thorne surmised that the
relationship could not be very distant. Mr. Arabin assured him that
it was so distant that the families knew nothing of each other. Mr.
Thorne laughed his gentle laugh at this and told Mr. Arabin that
there was now existing no branch of his family separated from the
parent stock at an earlier date than the reign of Elizabeth, and
that therefore Mr. Arabin could not call himself distant. Mr. Arabin
himself was quite clearly an Arabin of Uphill Stanton.

"But," said the vicar, "Uphill Stanton has been sold to the De Greys
and has been in their hands for the last fifty years."

"And when it has been there one hundred and fifty, if it unluckily
remain there so long," said Mr. Thorne, "your descendants will not
be a whit the less entitled to describe themselves as being of the
family of Uphill Stanton. Thank God no De Grey can buy that--and
thank God no Arabin, and no Thorne, can sell it."

In politics Mr. Thorne was an unflinching conservative. He looked on
those fifty-three Trojans who, as Mr. Dod tells us, censured free
trade in November, 1852, as the only patriots left among the public
men of England. When that terrible crisis of free trade had a