KINGS AND PRINCES.

The following dialogue is related of Mr. Pope and the Prince of Wales :-" Mr. Pope, you don't love princes." "Sir, I beg your pardon." "Well, you don't love kings, then!" 66 Sir, I own I love the lion best before his claws are grown." Was it possible to make a better answer to such simple questions?

A DRAM-DRINKER'S MOTTO.

Mr. Chute, a friend of Walpole's, passing by the door of Mrs. Edwards, who died of drams, he saw the motto which the undertakers had placed to her escutcheon, Mors janua vita: he said it ought to have been Mors aqua vitæ.

A STUCK-UP HOST.

Lord John Townshend was at a grand dinner, where the smallness of the establishment obliged the entertainer, a coarse upstart, to transform the gardener, the stable-boy, and even the coachman, into waiters. Several awkward mishaps were the consequence. Among others, the coachman upset the butter-boat over Townshend's clothes. Determined to expose his pretentious host, his Lordship exclaimed aloud, as he wiped off the butter," John, take my advice, and in future never grease anything but your wheels."

PURE DICTION.

The poet, Malherbe, the founder of the purity of the French language, was very sensitive on the score of diction. When, during his last moments, bis confessor, by way of encouraging him, began to enlarge on the joys of Paradise, "Stop," cried Malherbe, "your ungrammatical style is giving me a distaste for them."

ENGLISH CREDULITY.

Pasquier, an old French author, says that in the time of Francis I. the French used to call their creditors "Des Anglois," from the facility with which the English gave credit to them in all treaties, though they had broken so many.

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THE DISCOVERIES OF POSTERITY.

When Walpole began to plant the grounds at Strawberry. Hill, he used to talk very learnedly with the nurseryman, except that now and then a lettuce run to seed overturned all his botany, as he more than once took it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. "Then," he says, "the deliberation with which trees grow is extremely inconvenient to my natural impatience. I lament living in so barbarous an age when we are come to see so little perfection in gardening. I am persuaded a hundred and fifty years hence it will be as common to remove oaks a hundred and fifty years old, as it is now to transplant tulip-roots. I have even begun a treatise or panegyric on the great discoveries made by posterity in all arts and sciences, wherein I shall particularly descant on the great and cheap convenience of making trout-rivers. I shall talk of a secret of roasting a wild boar and a whole pack of hounds alive, without hurting them, so that the whole chase may be brought up to table. Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds, tame tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to see all that is doing in China, with a thousand other toys, which we now look upon as impracticable; and which pert posterity would laugh in one's face for staring at, while they are offering rewards for perfecting discoveries, of the principles of which we have not the least conception! If ever this book should come forth, I must expect to have all the learned in arms against me, who measure all knowledge backward: some of them have discovered symptoms of all arts in Homer; and Pineda (the Spanish Jesuit) had so much faith in the accomplishments of his ancestors, that he believed Adam understood all sciences but politics. But as these great champions for our forefathers are dead, and Boileau not alive to pitch me into a verse with Herrault, I am determined to admire the learning of posterity, especially being convinced that half our present knowledge sprung from discovering the errors of what had formerly been called so. I don't think I shall ever make any great discoveries myself, and therefore shall be content to propose them to my descendants, like my Lord Bacon, who, as Dr. Shaw says very prettily, in his Preface to Boyle, 'had the art of inventing arts; or rather, like a Marquis of Worcester, of whom I have seen a little book which he calls 'A Century of

Inventions,' where he has set down a hundred machines to do impossibilities with, and not a single direction how to make the machines themselves."

PRIDE OF HERALDRY.

Walpole, writing to Sir Horace Mann, tells him that Mr. Chute, who was always thinking of blazoning his pedigree in the noblest colours, had just tapped a new and very great family for him "in short," says Walpole to Sir Horace, 'by your mother it is very clear that you are descended from Hubert de Burgh, Grand Justiciary to Richard II. ; indeed, I think he was hanged; but that is a misfortune that will attend very illustrious genealogies; it is as common to them as to the pedigrees of Paddington and Blackheath. I have had at least a dozen great-grandfathers that came to untimely ends. All your virtuosos in heraldry are content to know that they had ancestors who lived five hundred years ago. A match with a low woman corrupts a stream of blood as long as the Danube-tyranny, villainy, and executions are mere flea-bites, and leave no stain.”

Lord Chesterfield placed among the portraits of his ancestors two old heads, inscribed Adam de Stanhope and Eve de Stanhope: the ridicule is admirable.

Old Peter Le Neve, the herald, who thought ridicule consisted in not being of an old family, made this epitaph, and it was a good one, for young Craggs, whose father had been a footman: "Here lies the last who died before the first of his family!" This old Craggs, who was angry with Arthur Moore, who had worn a livery too, and who was getting into a coach with him, turned about and said: "Why, Arthur, I am always going to get up behind; are not you?"

TRUE DIGNITY.

We have (says Walpole) in our family an instance of real dignity of mind, and I set it down as the most honourable alliance in the pedigree. The Dowager Lady Walpole, you know, was a French staymaker's daughter. When Ambassadress in France, the Queen expressed surprise at her speaking so good French. Lady Walpole said she was a French woman. "Française?" replied the Queen." "Vous Française, Madame ! et de quelle famille ?" "D'aucune, Madame," answered my

aunt.

“Don't you think that aucune sounded greater than Montmorency would have done? One must have a great soul to be of the aucune family, which is not necessary to be a Howard."

PRECEDENCE.

Two ladies contended for precedence in the court of Charles V. They appealed to the monarch, who, like Solomon, awarded: "Let the elder go first." Such a dispute was never known afterwards.

When King William landed, he said to Sir Edward Seymour, the Speaker, "Sir Edward, I think you are of the Duke of Somerset's family." "No, Sir; he is of mine," was the Speaker's reply.

"Precedence of rank," says Furetière, "has its charms, certainly; though I cannot go so far as a lady of my acquaintance, who wished to die before her husband. I inquired of her the reason of wishing so extraordinary a thing. 'Because,' said her ladyship, if my husband dies before me, I cannot put his arms on his tomb, because he is not a man of family; though, should I die first, he can claim a right of placing my arms on my tomb, because I am a woman of quality by birth.""

SMALL PRECEDENT.

An amusing illustration of this weak point is told. "When Lord Baltimore would not come into the Admiralty, because in the new commission they had given Lord Vere Beauclerc the precedence, a gentleman at Tom's Coffee-house said, "It put him in mind of Penkethman's petition in The Spectator, where he complains that formerly he used to act second chair in Diocletian, but now was reduced to dance fifth flowerpot."

SPANISH GRANDEES.

In Spain, it is the ambition of grandees to unite in themselves as many grandeeships as possible by the marriage of heiresses, whose names and titles are assumed by their husbands; whence the old story of a benighted grandee, who knocked at a lonely inn, and when asked, as usual, “Quien és ?" ("Who is there?") replied, "Don Diego de Mendoza Silva Ribero Guzman Pimental Osario Ponce de Leon Gumaga, Accrora Tellez y Giron, Sandoval y Boxas, Velasco

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""In that case," interrupted the landlord, shutting his window, "go with God. There is not room for half of you."

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS.

What a drawback on beaux sentiments and romantic ideas is presented in Pasquier's account of the execution of the Queen of Scots: he says, "The night before, knowing her body must be stripped for her shroud, she would have her feet washed, because she used ointment to one of them which was sore. In a very old trial of her, which Walpole bought from Lord Oxford's collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman. Take sentiments out of their pantoufles and reduce them to the infirmities of mortality, what a falling off is there!

THE HOUSES OF HUDDLESTONE AND HOWARD.

Mr. Huddlestone believed himself to be lineally descended from Athelstane, of which his name was allowed to be an undeniable corruption; and amongst others by the Duke of Norfolk. These two worthies often met over a bottle to discuss the respective pretensions of their pedigrees; and on one of these occasions, when Mr. Huddlestone was dining with the Duke, the discussion was prolonged till the descendant of the Saxon Kings fairly rolled from his chair upon the floor. One of the younger members of the family hastened, by the Duke's desire, to re-establish him, but he sternly repelled the proffered hand of the cadet. "Never," he hiccupped out,

"shall it be said that the head of the house of Huddlestone was lifted from the ground by a younger branch of the house of Howard." "Well, then, my good old friend," said the good-natured Duke, "I must try what I can do for you myself. The head of the house of Howard is too drunk to pick up the head of the house of Huddlestone, but he will lie down beside him with all the pleasure in the world;" so saying, the Duke also took his place upon the floor. The concluding part of this anecdote has been plagiarised, and applied to other people, but the authenticity of this version may be relied on.-Quarterly Review.

EPITAPH ON A BELLE.

Lord Conway's sister, Miss Jenny, a belle of Walpole's time, died suddenly with drinking too freely of lemonade at