ng on, the cry resounded from
the walls many times in the day, of "John, Yearl Crauford, bring us
another hod o' lime." One of Oliver Cromwell's great-grandsons was a
grocer in London, and others of his descendants died in great
poverty. Many barons of proud names and titles have perished, like
the sloth, upon their family tree, after eating up all the leaves;
while others have been overtaken by adversities which they have been
unable to retrieve, and have sunk at last into poverty and obscurity.
Such are the mutabilities of rank and fortune.

The great bulk of the English peerage is comparatively modern, so far
as the titles go; but it is not the less noble that it has been
recruited to so large an extent from the ranks of honorable industry.
In olden times, the wealth and commerce of London, conducted as it
was by energetic and enterprising men, was a prolific source of
peerages. Thus, the earldom of Cornwallis was founded by Thomas
Cornwallis, the Cheapside merchant; that of Essex by William Capel,
the draper; and that of Craven by William Craven, the merchant
tailor. The modern Earl of Warwick is not descended from the "King-
maker," but from William Greville, the woolstapler; whilst the modern
dukes of Northumberland find their head, not in the Percys, but in
Hugh Smithson, a respectable London apothecary. The founders of the
families of Dartmouth, Radnor, Ducie, and Pomfret, were respectively
a skinner, a silk manufacturer, a merchant tailor, and a Calais
merchant; whilst the founders of the peerages of Tankerville, Dormer,
and Coventry, were mercers. The ancestors of Earl Romney, and Lord
Dudley and Ward, were goldsmiths and jewelers; and Lord Dacres was a
banker in the reign of Charles I, as Lord Overstone is in that of
Queen Victoria. Edward Osborne, the founder of the dukedom of Leeds,
was apprentice to William Hewet, a rich cloth-worker on London
Bridge, whose only daughter he courageously rescued from drowning, by
leaping into the Thames after her, and whom he eventually married.

William Phipps, at one time Colonial Governor of Massachusetts, and
the founder of the Normandy family, was the son of a gunsmith who
emigrated to Maine, where this remarkable man was born in 1651. He
was one of a family of not fewer than twenty-six children (of whom
twenty-one were sons), whose only fortune lay in their stout hearts
and strong arms. William seems to have had a sash of the Danish
seablood in his veins, and he did