. We may be
exulting, by proxy, in successful immorality, or even crime. Our
boastfulness of our progenitors is necessarily in most cases very
vague, because we know so little about them. When we come to the
particular, the record stops very short indeed--generally at one's
grandmother, who, by the way, plays a part in the dream-drama of
ancestry little superior to that of that 'rank outsider,' a
mother-in-law. 'Tell that to your grandmother' is a phrase that
certainly did not originate in reverence; and even when that lady is
proverbially alluded to in a complimentary sense, her intelligence is
only eulogised in connection with the 'sucking of eggs.'

It so happens that I have quite a considerable line of ancestors
myself, but only one of them ever distinguished himself, and that (he
was an Attorney-General) in a doubtful way; and I confess I don't take
the slightest interest in them. I prefer the pleasant companion with
whom I came up in the train yesterday, and whose name I forgot to ask,
to the whole lot of them.

And if I don't care about ancestors on canvas (for their pictures, of
course, are all we have seen of them), I have good cause to be offended
with them on paper. My favourite biographies--such as that of Walter
Scott, for example--are disfigured by them. When men sit down to write
a great man's life, why should they weary us with an epitome of that of
his grandfather and grandmother? Of course, the book has to be a
certain length. No one is more sensible than myself of the difficulty
of providing 'copy' sufficient for two octavo volumes; but I do think
biographers should confine themselves to two generations. For my part,
I could do with one, but there is the favourite theory of a great man's
inheriting his greatness from the maternal parent, which I am well
aware cannot be dispensed with. It is like the white horse, or rather
the grey mare, in Wouvermanns's pictures; you can't get rid of it any
more than Mr. Dick could get Charles I. out of his memorial. For my
part, I always begin biographies at the fourteenth chapter (or
thereabouts)--'The subject of this memoir was born,' etc.; and even so
I find I get quite enough of them. In novels the introduction of
ancestry is absolutely intolerable. When I see that hateful chapter
headed 'Retrospective,' I pass over to the other side, like the Levite,
only quicker. What do I care whether our hero's grandfather was
Archbishop of Canterbury or a professional body