The List of Honours, usually published on Her Majesty’s Birthday, is this year[23] reserved till the Jubilee Day, and to sanguine aspirants I would say, in Mrs. Gamp’s immortal words, “Seek not to proticipate.”  Such a list always contains food for the reflective mind, and some of the thoughts which it suggests may even lie too deep for tears.  Why is my namesake picked out for knighthood, while I remain hidden in my native obscurity?  Why is my rival made a C.B., while I “go forth Companionless” to meet the chances and the vexations of another year?  But there is balm in Gilead.  If I have fared badly, my friends have done little better.  Like Mr. Squeers, when Bolder’s father was two pound ten short, they have had their disappointments to contend against.  A., who was so confident of a peerage, is fobbed off with a baronetcy; and B., whose labours for the Primrose League entitled him to expect the Bath, finds himself grouped with the Queen’s footmen in the Royal Victorian Order.  As, when Sir Robert Peel declined to form a Government in 1839, “twenty gentlemen who had not been appointed Under Secretaries for State moaned over the martyrdom of young ambition,” so during the first fortnight of 1897 at least that number of middle-aged self-seekers came to the regretful conclusion that Lord Salisbury was not sufficiently a man of the world for his present position, and inwardly asked why a judge or a surgeon should be preferred before a company-promoter or a party hack.  And, while feeling is thus fermenting at the base of the social edifice, things are not really tranquil at the summit.

It is not long since the chief of the princely House of Duff was raised to the first order of the peerage, and one or two opulent earls, encouraged by his example, are understood to be looking upward.  Every constitutional Briton, whatever his political creed, has in his heart of hearts a wholesome reverence for a dukedom.  Lord Beaconsfield, who understood these little traits of our national character even more perfectly than Thackeray, says of his favourite St. Aldegonde (who was heir to the richest dukedom in the kingdom) that “he held extreme opinions, especially on political affairs, being a Republican of the reddest dye.  He was opposed to all privilege, and indeed to all orders of men except dukes, who were a necessity.”  That is a delicious touch.  St. Aldegonde, whatever his political aberrations, “voiced” the universal sentiment of his less fortunate fellow-citizens; nor can the most soaring ambition of the British Matron desire a nobler epitaph than that of the lady immortalized by Thomas Ingoldsby:—­

    “She drank prussic acid without any water,
     And died like a Duke-and-a-Duchess’s daughter.”