What is a Baronet? ask some.  Sir Wilfrid Lawson (who ought to know) replies that he is a man “who has ceased to be a gentleman and has not become a nobleman.”  But this is too severe a judgment.  It breathes a spirit of contempt bred of familiarity, which may, without irreverence, be assumed by a member of an exalted Order, but which a humble outsider would do well to avoid.  As Major Pendennis said of a similar manifestation, “It sits prettily enough on a young patrician in early life, though, nothing is so loathsome among persons of our rank.”  I turn, therefore, for an answer to Sir Bernard Burke, who says:  “The hereditary Order of Baronets was created by patent in England by King James I. in 1611.  At the institution many of the chief estated gentlemen of the kingdom were selected for the dignity.  The first batch of Baronets comprised some of the principal landed proprietors among the best-descended gentlemen of the kingdom, and the list was headed by a name illustrious more than any other for the intellectual pre-eminence with which it is associated—­the name of Bacon.  The Order of Baronets is scarcely estimated at its proper value.”

I cannot help feeling that this account of the baronetage, though admirable in tone and spirit, and actually pathetic in its closing touch of regretful melancholy, is a little wanting in what the French would call “actuality.”  It leaves out of sight the most endearing, because the most human, trait of the baronetage—­its pecuniary origin.  On this point let us hear the historian Hume—­“The title of Baronet was sold and two hundred patents of that species of knighthood were disposed of for so many thousand pounds.”  This was truly epoch-making.  It was one of those “actions of the just” which “smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”  King James’s baronets were the models and precursors of all who to the end of time should traffic in the purchase of honours.  Their example has justified posterity, and the precedent which they set is to-day the principal method by which the war-chests of our political parties are replenished.

Another authority, handling the same high theme, tells us that the rebellion in Ulster gave rise to this Order, and “it was required of each baronet on his creation to pay into the Exchequer as much as would maintain thirty soldiers three years at eight-pence a day in the province of Ulster,” and, as a historical memorial of their original service, the baronets bear as an augmentation to their coats-of-arms the royal badge of Ulster—­a Bloody Hand on a white field.  It was in apt reference to this that a famous Whip, on learning that a baronet of his party was extremely anxious to be promoted to the peerage, said, “You can tell Sir Peter Proudflesh, with my compliments, that we don’t do these things for nothing.  If he wants a peerage, he will have to put his Bloody Hand into his pocket.”