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self on his knee, he exclaimed indignantly, My first duchess was a Percy, and she never thought of taking such a liberty.' One of the most remarkable incidents in her life was yet to come. It was she who, by dint of tears and supplications, prevented Queen Anne from making Swift a bishop, out of revenge for the Windsor Prophecy,' in which she is ridiculed for the redness of her hair and upbraided as having been privy to the murder of her second husband. 'It was doubted,' says Scott, which imputation she accounted the more cruel insult, especially since the first charge was undoubted, and the second arose only from the malice of the poet.'

When the fortunes of the House of Avenel apparently all hang on Mary, and her marriage with Halbert Glendinning is at hand, the White Spirit looks with sorrow on her golden zone, now diminished to the fineness of a silken thread, and exclaims:

'The knot of fate at length is tied,
The churl is lord, the maid is bride;
Wither bush, and perish well,

Fall'n is the lofty Avenel.'

The spirit or genius, if there be one, which watches over the fortunes of the Percys must have undergone a corresponding sense of depression when by the death of Algernon, the son and successor of the proud duke, without male issue, their honours again devolved on a female, who married Sir Hugh Smithson, a Yorkshire baronet of good family. His son is known to fame as having elicited the solitary bon mot attributed to George III. Disappointed at not getting the Garter, in addition to all the rest of the titles and honours commonly enjoyed by the head of his wife's family, he bitterly exclaimed that he was the first Duke of Northumberland that had ever been refused the Garter. Yes,' was the retort; and the first Smithson that ever asked for it.'

The main line of the Nevilles presents one of the most startling instances of vicissitude, when we contrast the position of the great Earl of Warwick, the kingmaker, in the zenith of his power, and that of his descendant, Charles Neville, sixth Earl of Westmoreland, in 1572. The last of the barons, as Lord Lytton terms Warwick, enjoyed yearly revenues estimated at 300,000l. of our money, and feasted daily 30,000 persons at the open tables of his castles. His descendant in the fourth degree was living in the Low Countries on a small pension allowed him by the King of Spain, and is mentioned by Lord Seton, in a letter to Mary Queen of Scots, as having neither penny nor halfpenny.' He remained in the same penniless state until his death, without male issue, in 1601.

The Doom of Buckingham,' the heading of one of Sir Bernard Burke's sections, is well justified by the fatality which seems to haunt the possessors of the dukedom. It was first bestowed on Humphrey de Stafford, who, with his eldest son, fell in the wars of the Roses. His second son and successor in the title was the friend and victim of Richard III., in whose honour Cibber interpolated the famous line which has made the fortune of more than one provincial actor. The sad story of the third duke may also be read in Shakespeare. He had imprudently defied Wolsey, who found no difficulty in trumping up a charge of treason, upon which the duke was found guilty by his peers and beheaded on Tower Hill. When the Emperor Charles V. heard of his execution, he is reported to have exclaimed, A butcher's dog has killed the finest buck in England.' The ducal title became extinct by his attainder, and the revival of the barony proved only a transitory gleam, for the male line expired towards the middle of the seventeenth century with Roger Stafford, who during much of an unhappy life bore the name of Fludd or Floyde. His sister married

a joiner, and was the mother of the Newport cobbler already mentioned as entitled to quarter the royal arms. The first Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, fell by the knife of Felton. The death-bed of the second has been immortalised by Pope, and the moral is little weakened by the assurance that instead of

In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung,
The walls of plaster, and the floors of dung,'

we should read, 'in a well-furnished apartment of his steward's house.' Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, so created in 1703, reflected quite as much lustre on the title as he derived from it; but his race ended with his son, who died of a consumption at Rome before attaining his majority.

We willingly drop a veil over the contemporary annals of this fated dukedom. They form a chapter of family history which, considering how very little of it is accurately known, has been more than sufficiently discussed. We shall only say that whatever is known redounds to the honour of the present bearer of the title. But whilst mourning over the dismantlement of Stowe and the irremediable dispersion of its varied treasures, we are irresistibly reminded of Canons, and are tempted to ask whether the star of Buckingham has not been rendered more lurid instead of brighter by its junction with that of Chandos

'At Timon's villa let us pass a day,

Where all cry out, What sums are thrown away!'

Though Pope tried hard to evade the responsibility, his satire was undoubtedly levelled at the Duke of Chandos, who impoverished himself and his heirs by laying out 200,000l. on a villa which they were obliged to pull down.

The Cromwells have risen as high and fallen as low as any family recorded in history. Dugdale says that Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, the mauler of mo

nasteries,' as Fuller calls him, was the son of a blacksmith at Putney, and had served under the Duke of Bourbon at the sacking of Rome. Having no children, he adopted and enriched a nephew, Sir Richard Williams, who took the name and became the progenitor of the race. There are five intermediate links between him and the Protector, on whose career it is superfluous to expatiate. The rapid degradation of the entire family, in all its branches, is the phenomenon which invites attention. The Protector had four sons and four daughters. Two of his sons survived him: Richard, who succeeded to the protectorate, and Henry, Lord Deputy of Ireland. Richard, whose reign lasted not quite eight months, resided abroad for the next twenty years, and is commonly believed to have assumed the name of Clarke on his return. This is hardly reconcilable with a story told by Miss Hawkins, on Lord Hardwicke's authority, of the ex-Protector's appearance in the Court of Chancery in 1705.

'The counsel made very free and unhandsome use of his (Richard Cromwell's) name, which, offending the good feelings of the Chancellor (Cowper), who knew he must be in court, and, at that time, a very old man, he looked round and said, "Is Mr. Cromwell in Court?" On his being pointed out in the crowd, he very benignly said, "Mr. Cromwell, I fear you are very inconveniently placed where you are; pray, come and take a seat on the bench by me." Of course, no more hard speeches were uttered against him. Bulstrode Whitelocke, then at the bar, said to Mr Yorke, "This day so many years, I saw my father carry the Great Seal before that man at Westminster Hall."'

He died in 1712, leaving two daughters and no male issue. Henry, the ex-Lord Deputy, resided, till his death in 1673, at his estate of Spinney Abbey, in Cambridgeshire. He left five sons and one daughter. All the sons died without issue, except one, who, after

losing or spending all his property, wrote thus to Lady Fauconberg, his aunt: Our family is low, and some are willing it should be kept so; yet I know we are a far ancienter family than many others. Sir Oliver Cromwell's my grandfather's, uncle's, and godfather's estate that was, is now let for above 50,000l. a year.' His son Thomas carried on the business of a grocer on Snow Hill, and died in 1748, leaving an only son, Oliver, solicitor and clerk to St. Thomas's Hospital, who succeeded, as devisee of two female cousins, to an estate at Theobald's, Herts, which had been granted by Charles II. to General Monk. He died in 1821, leaving one daughter, married to Mr Russell of Cheshunt Park.

'With this Oliver Cromwell, the attorney and the son of the grocer,' says Sir Bernard Burke, the male line of the Lord Protector's family expired.' Yet the pedigree, as set forth in the 'Dictionary of the Landed Gentry,' by the same learned author, reads like that of an ordinary country gentleman, and the grocer figures as an esquire. We strongly suspect that a good many of the pedigrees preserved in such repositories, which look fair enough on the face of them, would be found, on close inspection, to have been similarly interrupted or defaced by mechanic pursuits or misalliances. Amongst the Protector's descendants through females, we read of a basket-maker in Cork, the lineal descendant of Ireton of one great-granddaughter married to a shoemaker of a second to a butcher's son, who had been her fellow-servant; and of a great-grandson's son and daughter earning their livelihood as a working jeweller and schoolmistress.

Upon the sarcophagus of the last Hampden is inscribed, John Hampden, twenty-fourth hereditary lord of Great Hampden.' The dignity of the family is proved by a tradition that, during a visit with which Edward III. and the Black Prince honoured the con