hese are indeed excellent things, and safeguards to the
nation. What a fine thing it is for the people to have twenty-five
dukes, five marquises, seventy-six earls, nine viscounts, and sixty-one
barons, making altogether a hundred and seventy-six peers, of which some
are your grace, and some my lord! What matter a few rags here and there,
withal: everybody cannot be dressed in gold. Let the rags be. Cannot you
see the purple? One balances the other. A thing must be built of
something. Yes, of course, there are the poor--what of them! They line
the happiness of the wealthy. Devil take it! our lords are our glory!
The pack of hounds belonging to Charles, Baron Mohun, costs him as much
as the hospital for lepers in Moorgate, and for Christ's Hospital,
founded for children, in 1553, by Edward VI. Thomas Osborne, Duke of
Leeds, spends yearly on his liveries five thousand golden guineas. The
Spanish grandees have a guardian appointed by law to prevent their
ruining themselves. That is cowardly. Our lords are extravagant and
magnificent. I esteem them for it. Let us not abuse them like envious
folks. I feel happy when a beautiful vision passes. I have not the
light, but I have the reflection. A reflection thrown on my ulcer, you
will say. Go to the devil! I am a Job, delighted in the contemplation of
Trimalcion. Oh, that beautiful and radiant planet up there! But the
moonlight is something. To suppress the lords was an idea which Orestes,
mad as he was, would not have dared to entertain. To say that the lords
are mischievous or useless is as much as to say that the state should be
revolutionized, and that men are not made to live like cattle, browsing
the grass and bitten by the dog. The field is shorn by the sheep, the
sheep by the shepherd. It is all one to me. I am a philosopher, and I
care about life as much as a fly. Life is but a lodging. When I think
that Henry Bowes Howard, Earl of Berkshire, has in his stable
twenty-four state carriages, of which one is mounted in silver and
another in gold--good heavens! I know that every one has not got
twenty-four state carriages; but there is no need to complain for all
that. Because you were cold one night, what was that to him? It concerns
you only. Others besides you suffer cold and hunger. Don't you know
that without that cold, Dea would not have been blind, and if Dea were
not blind she would not love you? Think of that, you fool! And, besides,
if all the people who are lost we