elp" shows how in England, a land where ancestry
counts for so much, the descendants of the greatest men, even of
kings, have been found in the humblest of callings.

The blood of all men flows from equally remote sources; and though
some are unable to trace their line directly beyond their
grandfathers, all are nevertheless justified in placing at the head
of their pedigree the great progenitors of the race, as Lord
Chesterfield did when he wrote, "ADAM _de Stanhope_--EVE _de
Stanhope_." No class is ever long stationary. The mighty fall, and
the humble are exalted. New families take the place of the old, who
disappear among the ranks of the common people. Burke's "Vicissitudes
of Families" strikingly exhibits the rise and fall of families, and
shows that the misfortunes which overtake the rich and noble are
greater in proportion than those which overwhelm the poor. This
author points out that of the twenty-five barons selected to enforce
the observance of Magna Charta, there is not now in the House of
Peers a single male descendant. Civil wars and rebellions ruined many
of the old nobility and dispersed their families. Yet their
descendants in many cases survive, and are to be found among the
ranks of the people. Fuller wrote in his "Worthies," that "some who
justly hold the surnames of Bohuns, Mortimers, and Plantagenets, are
hid in the heap of common men." Thus Burke shows that two of the
lineal descendants of the Earl of Kent, sixth son of Edward I, were
discovered in a butcher and a toll-gatherer; that the great-grandson
of Margaret Plantagenet, daughter of the Duke of Clarence, sank to
the condition of a cobbler at Newport, in Shropshire; and that among
the lineal descendants of the Duke of Gloucester, son of Edward III,
was the late sexton of St. George's Church, London. It is understood
that the lineal descendant of Simon de Montfort, England's premier
baron, is a saddler in Tooley street. One of the descendants of the
"Proud Percys," a claimant of the title of Duke of Northumberland,
was a Dublin trunkmaker; and not many years since one of the
claimants for the title of Earl of Perth presented himself in the
person of a laborer in a Northumberland coal-pit. Hugh Miller, when
working as a stone-mason near Edinburgh, was served by a hodman, who
was one of the numerous claimants for the earldom of Crauford--all
that was wanted to establish his claim being a missing marriage
certificate; and while the work was goi