is is the law which he lays down:--

"The persons now privileged to wear the ancient golden collar of
SS. are the _equites aurati_, or knights (chevaliers) in the
British monarchy, a body which includes all the hereditary order
of baronets in England, Scotland, and Ireland, with such of
their eldest sons, being of age, as choose to claim inauguration
as knights."

Here we have a full confession of a large part of the faith of the
Baronets' Committee,--a committee of which the greater number of those
who lent their names to it are probably by this time heartily ashamed.
It is the doctrine held forth in several works on the Baronetage
compiled by a person calling himself "Sir Richard Broun," of whom we
read in Dodd's _Baronetage_, that "previous to succeeding his father, he
demanded inauguration as a knight, in the capacity of a baronet's eldest
son; but the Lord Chamberlain having refused to present him to the Queen
for that purpose, he assumed the title of 'Sir,' and the addition of
'Eques Auratus,' in June, 1842." So we see that ARMIGER and the Lord
Chamberlain are at variance as to part of the law above cited; and so,
it might be added, have been other legal authorities, to the privileges
asserted by the mouthpiece of the said committee. But that is a long
story, on which I do not intend here to enter. I had not forgotten that
in one of the publications of Sir Richard Broun the armorial coat of the
premier baronet of each division is represented encircled with a Collar
of Esses; but I should never have thought of alluding to this freak,
except as an amusing instance of fantastic assumption. I will now
confine myself to what has appeared in the pages of "NOTES AND QUERIES;"
and, more particularly, to the unfounded assertion of ARMIGER in p.
194., "that the golden Collar of SS. was the undoubted badge or mark of
a knight, _eques auratus_;" which he follows up by the dictum already
quoted, that "the persons now privileged to wear the ancient golden
Collar of SS. are the _equites aurati_." I believe it is generally
admitted that knights were _equites aurati_ because they wore golden or
gilt spurs; certainly it was not because they wore golden collars, as
ARMIGER seems to wish us to believe; and the best proof that the Collar
of Esses was not the badge of a knight, as such, at the time when such
collars were most worn, in the fifteenth century, is this--that the
monumental effigies and sepulchral b