Order of the Thistle"--is scarcely less coveted than the supreme
honour of the Garter; but wild horses should not drag from me the name
of the Scottish peer of whom his political leader said, "If I gave ----
the Thistle, he would eat it." The Bath tries to make up by the lurid
splendour of its ribbon and the brilliancy of its star for its
comparatively humble and homely associations. It is the peculiar prize
of Generals and Home Secretaries, and is displayed with manly openness
on the bosom of the statesman once characteristically described by Lord
Beaconsfield as "Mr. Secretary Cross, whom I can never remember to call
Sir Richard."

But, after all said and done, the institution of knighthood is older
than any particular order of knights; and lovers of the old world must
observe with regret the discredit into which it has fallen since it
became the guerdon of the successful grocer. When Lord Beaconsfield left
office in 1880 he conferred a knighthood--the first of a long series
similarly bestowed--on an eminent journalist. The friends of the new
knight were inclined to banter him, and proposed his health at a dinner
in facetious terms. Lord Beaconsfield, who was of the company, looked
preternaturally grave, and, filling his glass, gazed steadily at the
flattered editor and said in his deepest tone: "Yes, Sir A.B., I drink
to your good health, and I congratulate you on having attained a rank
which was deemed sufficient honour for Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter
Raleigh, Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren."

But a truce to this idle jesting on exalted themes--too palpably the
utterance of social envy and mortified ambition. "They _are_ our
superiors, and that's the fact," as Thackeray exclaims in his chapter on
the Whigs. "I am not a Whig myself; but, oh, how I should like to be
one!" In a similar spirit of compunctious self-abasement, the present
writer may exclaim, "I have not myself been included in the list of
Birthday Honours,--but, oh, how I should like to be there!"

FOOTNOTES:

[23] 1897.

[24] Since this passage was written, a return has been made to the
earlier practice, and an Irish peerage has been created--the first since
1868.

XXI.

THE QUEEN'S ACCESSION.

The writer of these chapters would not willingly fall behind his
countrymen in the loyal sentiments and picturesque memories proper to
the "high mid-summer pomps" which begin to-morrow.[25] But there is an
almost insuperable diffi