me powers in the world of rank and
birth, from the influence they are able to bring upon questions of
succession and inheritance. Hence they are, like all great influences,
courted and feared. Their ministry is often desired and sometimes
necessary; but it is received with misgiving and awe, since, like the
demons of old summoned by incantation, they may destroy the audacious
mortal who demands their services. The most sagacious and sceptical men
are apt to be mildly susceptible to conviction in the matter of their
own pedigrees, and, a little conscious of their weakness, they shrink
from letting the sacred tree be handled by relentless and unsympathising
adepts. One of these intellectual tyrants, a man of great ability, when
he quarrelled with any one, used to threaten to "bastardise" him, or to
find the bend-sinister somewhere in his ancestry; and his experience in
long genealogies made him feel assured, in the general case, of finding
what he sought if he went far enough back for it.

The next volume you lay hand on is manifestly edited by an
Ecclesiologist, or a votary of that recent addition to the constituted
"ologies," which has come into existence as the joint offspring of the
revival of Gothic architecture and the study of primitive-church
theology. Through this dim religious light he views all the things in
heaven and earth that are dealt with in his philosophy. His notes are
profusely decorated with a rich array of rood screens, finial crockets,
lavatories, aumbries, lecterns, lych sheds, albs, stoups, sedilia,
credence tables, pixes, hagioscopes, baudekyns, and squenches. It is
evident that he keeps a Bestiary, or record of his experiences in
bestiology, otherwise called bestial eikonography; and if he be
requested to give a more explicit definition of the article, he will
perhaps inform you that it is a record of the types of the
ecclesiological symbolisation of beasts. If you prevail on him to
exhibit to you this solemn record, which he will open with befitting
reverence, the faintest suspicion of a smile curling on your lip will
suffuse him with a lively sorrow for your lost condition, mixed with
righteous indignation towards the irreverent folly whereof you have been
guilty. He finds a great deal beyond sermons in stones, and can point
out to you a certain piece of rather confused-looking architecture,
which he terms a symbolical epitome of all knowledge, human and
divine--an eikonographic encyclopaedia.