As, according to Dr. Johnson, all claret would be port if it could, so, presumably, every marquis would like to be a duke; and yet, as a matter of fact, that Elysian translation is not often made.  A marquis, properly regarded, is not so much a nascent duke as a magnified earl.  A shrewd observer of the world once said to me:  “When an earl gets a marquisate, it is worth a hundred thousand pounds in hard money to his family.”  The explanation of this cryptic utterance is that, whereas an earl’s younger sons are “misters,” a marquis’s younger sons are “lords.”  Each “my lord” can make a “my lady,” and therefore commands a distinctly higher price in the marriage-market of a wholesomely-minded community.  Miss Higgs, with her fifty thousand pounds, might scorn the notion of becoming the Honourable Mrs. Percy Popjoy; but as Lady Magnus Charters she would feel a laudable ambition gratified.

An earldom is, in its combination of euphony, antiquity, and association, perhaps the most impressive of all the titles in the peerage.  Most rightly did the fourteenth Earl of Derby decline to be degraded into a brand-new duke.  An earldom has always been the right of a Prime Minister who wishes to leave the Commons.  In 1880 a member of the House of Russell (in which there are certain Whiggish traditions of jobbery) was fighting a hotly contested election, and his ardent supporters brought out a sarcastic placard—­“Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield!  He made himself an earl and the people poor”; to which a rejoinder was instantly forthcoming—­“John, Earl Russell!  He made himself an earl and his relations rich.”  The amount of truth in the two statements was about equal.  In 1885 this order of the peerage missed the greatest distinction which fate is likely ever to offer it, when Mr. Gladstone declined the earldom proffered by her Majesty on his retirement from office.  Had he accepted, it was understood that the representatives of the last Earl of Liverpool would have waived their claims to the extinct title, and the greatest of the Queen’s Prime Ministers would have borne the name of the city which gave him birth.

But, magnificent and euphonious as an earldom is, the children of an earl are the half-castes of the peerage.  The eldest son is “my lord,” and his sisters are “my lady;” and ever since the days of Mr. Foker, Senior, it has been de rigueur for an opulent brewer to marry an earl’s daughter; but the younger sons are not distinguishable from the ignominious progeny of viscounts and barons.  Two little boys, respectively the eldest and the second son of an earl, were playing on the front staircase of their home, when the eldest fell over into the hall below.  The younger called to the footman who picked his brother up, “Is he hurt?” “Killed, my lord,” was the instantanteous reply of a servant who knew the devolution of a courtesy title.