t to attend
the funerals of the Quality, and to be gratified with heavy fees for
his office; although in our days 'tis only public noblemen, generals,
ambassadors, and the like, who are so honoured at their interment, only
undertaker's pageantry being permitted to the private sort)--that
Clarencieux himself might have attended to marshal the following, and
proclaim the Style of the Departed; but that it was ordered by authority
that, as in her life her name and honours had been kept secret, so
likewise in her death she was to remain an Unknown Lady. How such a
reticence was found to jump with the dictates of the law, which required
a registry of all dead persons in the parish-books, I know not; but in
that time there were many things suffered to the Great which to the
meaner kind would have been sternly denied; and, indeed, I have since
heard tell that sufferance even went beyond the concealment of her Name,
and that she was not even buried in woollen,--a thing then very strictly
insisted upon, in order to encourage the staple manufactures of
Lancashire and the North,--and that, either by a Faculty from the
Arches Court, or a winking and conniving of Authority, she was placed in
her coffin in the same garb in which she had lain in state. Of such
sorry mocks and sneers as to the velvet of her funeral coffer being
nearer Purple than Crimson in its hue, and of my mourning cloak being
edged with a narrow strip of a Violet tinge,--as though to hint in some
wise that my Grandmother was foregathered, either by descent or by
marital alliance, with Royalty,--I take little account. 'Tis not every
one who is sprung from the loins of a King who cares to publish the
particulars of his lineage, and John Dangerous may perchance be one of
such discreet men.

The doctors had been so long in the house that their names and their
faces were familiar to me, not indeed as friends, but as that kind of
acquaintance one may see every day for twenty years, and be not very
grieved some morning if news comes that they are dead. Such an
eye-acquaintance passes my windows every morning. I know his face, his
form, his hat and coat, the very tie of his wig and the fashion of his
shoe-buckle; but he is no more to me than I am haply to him, and there
would be scant weeping, I opine, between us if either of us were to die.
So I knew these doctors and regarded them little, wondering only why
they ate and drank so much, and could so ill conceal their hatre