r names.
Not only do we see among the Egyptians, where Pharaoh was synonymous
with king, and among the Romans, where to be Caesar meant to be Emperor,
that the proper names of the greatest men were transferred to their
successors, and so became class names; but in the Scandinavian mythology
we may trace a human title of honour up to the proper name of a divine
personage. In Anglo-Saxon _bealdor_, or _baldor_, means _Lord_; and
Balder is the name of the favourite of Odin's sons--the gods who with
him constitute the Teutonic Pantheon. How these names of honour became
general is easily understood. The relatives of the primitive kings--the
grandees described by Selden as having names formed on those of the
gods, and shown by this to be members of the divine race--necessarily
shared in the epithets, such as _Lord_, descriptive of superhuman
relationships and nature. Their ever-multiplying offspring inheriting
these, gradually rendered them comparatively common. And then they came
to be applied to every man of power: partly from the fact that, in these
early days when men conceived divinity simply as a stronger kind of
humanity, great persons could be called by divine epithets with but
little exaggeration; partly from the fact that the unusually potent were
apt to be considered as unrecognised or illegitimate descendants of "the
strong, the destroyer, the powerful one;" and partly, also, from
compliment and the desire to propitiate.

Progressively as superstition diminished, this last became the sole
cause. And if we remember that it is the nature of compliment, as we
daily hear it, to attribute more than is due--that in the constantly
widening application of "esquire," in the perpetual repetition of "your
honour" by the fawning Irishman, and in the use of the name "gentleman"
to any coalheaver or dustman by the lower classes of London, we have
current examples of the depreciation of titles consequent on
compliment--and that in barbarous times, when the wish to propitiate was
stronger than now, this effect must have been greater; we shall see that
there naturally arose an extensive misuse of all early distinctions.
Hence the facts, that the Jews called Herod a god; that _Father_, in its
higher sense, was a term used among them by servants to masters; that
_Lord_ was applicable to any person of worth and power. Hence, too, the
fact that, in the later periods of the Roman Empire, every man saluted
his neighbour as _Dominus_ and