For the female mind the baronetage has a peculiar fascination.  As there was once a female Freemason, so there was once a female baronet—­Dame Maria Bolles, of Osberton, in the County of Nottingham.  The rank of a baronet’s wife is not unfrequently conferred on the widow of a man to whom a baronetcy had been promised and who died too soon to receive it.  “Call me a vulgar woman!” screamed a lady once prominent in society when a good-natured friend repeated a critical comment.  “Call me a vulgar woman! me, who was Miss Blank, of Blank Hall, and if I had been a boy should have been a baronet!”

The baronets of fiction are, like their congeners in real life, a numerous and a motley band.  Lord Beaconsfield described, with a brilliancy of touch which was all his own, the labours and the sacrifices of Sir Vavasour Firebrace on behalf of the Order of Baronets and the privileges wrongfully withheld from them.  “They are evidently the body destined to save this country; blending all sympathies—­the Crown, of which they are the peculiar champions:  the nobles, of whom they are the popular branch; the people, who recognize in them their natural leaders....  Had the poor King lived, we should at least have had the Badge,” added Sir Vavasour mournfully.

“The Badge?”

“It would have satisfied Sir Grosvenor le Draughte; he was for compromise.  But, confound him, his father was only an accoucheur.”

A great merit of the baronets, from the novelist’s point of view, is that they and their belongings are so uncommonly easy to draw.  He is Sir Grosvenor, his wife is Lady le Draughte, his sons, elder and younger, are Mr. le Draughte, and his daughters Miss le Draughte.  The wayfaring men, though fools, cannot err where the rule is so simple, and accordingly the baronets enjoy a deserved popularity with those novelists who look up to the titled classes of society as men look at the stars, but are a little puzzled about their proper designations.  Miss Braddon alone has drawn more baronets, virtuous and vicious, handsome and hideous, than would have colonized Ulster ten times over and left a residue for Nova Scotia.  Sir Pitt Crawley and Sir Barnes Newcome will live as long as English novels are read, and I hope that dull forgetfulness will never seize as its prey Sir Alfred Mogyns Smyth de Mogyns, who was born Alfred Smith Muggins, but traced a descent from Hogyn Mogyn of the Hundred Beeves, and took for his motto “Ung Roy ung Mogyns.”  His pedigree is drawn in the seventh chapter of the Book of Snobs, and is imitated with great fidelity on more than one page of Burke’s Peerage.

An eye closely intent upon the lesser beauties of the natural world will find a very engaging specimen of the genus Baronet in Sir Barnet Skettles, who was so kind to Paul Dombey and so angry with poor Mr. Baps.  Sir Leicester Dedlock is on a larger scale—­in fact, almost too “fine and large” for life.  But I recall a fleeting vision of perfect loveliness among Miss Monflathers’s pupils—­“a baronet’s daughter who by some extraordinary reversal of the laws of Nature was not only plain in feature but dull in intellect.”