ne had told him that he was laying the
foundations of four families which should hold their heads proudly among
the highest in the land he would no doubt have laughed aloud.

Yet John Baring lived to see his only daughter wedded to John Dunning,
who made a Baroness of her. Of his four sons, Francis was created a
Baronet by William Pitt, and found a wife in the cousin and co-heir of
his Grace of Canterbury. The second son of this union, Alexander, was
raised to the Peerage as Baron Ashburton, won a millionaire bride in the
daughter of Senator Bingham, of Philadelphia, and, from the immense
scale of his financial operations, was ranked by the Duc de Richelieu as
"one of the six great powers of Europe"--England, France, Russia,
Austria, and Prussia being the other five. Sir Francis's eldest
grandson, after serving in the exalted offices of Chancellor of the
Exchequer and First Lord of the Admiralty, was created Baron Northbrook,
a peerage which his son raised to an earldom; a second grandson
qualified for a coronet as Baron Revelstoke; and a third is known to-day
as Earl Cromer, the maker of modern Egypt, with half an alphabet of high
dignities after his name.

At least three dukes (Northumberland, Leeds, and Bedford) count among
their forefathers many a humble tradesman. Glancing down the pedigree of
his Grace of Northumberland, we find among his direct ancestors such
names as these, William le Smythesonne, of Thornton Watlous, husbandman;
William Smitheson, of Newsham, husbandman; Ralph Smithson, tenant
farmer; and Anthony Smithson, yeoman. It was this Anthony whose son,
Hugh, left the paternal farm to serve behind the counter of Ralph and
William Robinson, London haberdashers, and thus to take the first step
of that successful career which made him a Baronet and a man of wealth.
From Hugh, the London 'prentice sprang in the fourth generation, that
other Hugh who won the hand of Lady Elizabeth Seymour, and with it the
vast estates and historic name of Percy.

Some years before Hugh Smithson, the farmer's son, set foot in London
streets, Edward Osborne left the modest family roof at Ashford, in Kent,
to serve his apprenticeship to, and sit at the board of, William Hewitt,
a merchant of Philpot Lane, who shortly after moved his belongings to a
more fashionable home on London Bridge. One day it chanced that while
his only daughter, the fair "Mistress Anne," was hanging her favourite
bird outside the parlour window she los