them the passport to happiness.  Fear them.  Do not meddle with them, lest they should meddle with you.  Wretch! do you know what the man is who is happy by right?  He is a terrible being.  He is a lord.  A lord!  He must have intrigued pretty well in the devil’s unknown country before he was born, to enter life by the door he did.  How difficult it must have been to him to be born!  It is the only trouble he has given himself; but, just heavens, what a one!—­to obtain from destiny, the blind blockhead, to mark him in his cradle a master of men.  To bribe the box-keeper to give him the best place at the show.  Read the memoranda in the old hut, which I have placed on half-pay.  Read that breviary of my wisdom, and you will see what it is to be a lord.  A lord is one who has all and is all.  A lord is one who exists above his own nature.  A lord is one who has when young the rights of an old man; when old, the success in intrigue of a young one; if vicious, the homage of respectable people; if a coward, the command of brave men; if a do-nothing, the fruits of labour; if ignorant, the diploma of Cambridge or Oxford; if a fool, the admiration of poets; if ugly, the smiles of women; if a Thersites, the helm of Achilles; if a hare, the skin of a lion.  Do not misunderstand my words.  I do not say that a lord must necessarily be ignorant, a coward, ugly, stupid, or old.  I only mean that he may be all those things without any detriment to himself.  On the contrary.  Lords are princes.  The King of England is only a lord, the first peer of the peerage; that is all, but it is much.  Kings were formerly called lords—­the Lord of Denmark, the Lord of Ireland, the Lord of the Isles.  The Lord of Norway was first called king three hundred years ago.  Lucius, the most ancient king in England, was spoken to by Saint Telesphonis as my Lord Lucius.  The lords are peers—­that is to say, equals—­of whom?  Of the king.  I do not commit the mistake of confounding the lords with parliament.  The assembly of the people which the Saxons before the Conquest called wittenagemote, the Normans, after the Conquest, entitled parliamentum.  By degrees the people were turned out.  The king’s letters clause convoking the Commons, addressed formerly ad concilium impendendum, are now addressed ad consentiendum.  To say yes is their liberty.  The peers can say no; and the proof is that they have said it.  The peers can cut off the king’s head.  The people cannot.  The stroke of the hatchet which decapitated Charles I. is an encroachment, not on the king, but on the peers, and it was well to place on the gibbet the carcass of Cromwell.  The lords have power.  Why?  Because they have riches.  Who has turned over the leaves of the Doomsday Book?  It is the proof that the lords possess England.  It is the registry of the estates of subjects, compiled under William the Conqueror; and it is in the charge of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.  To copy anything in it you have to pay twopence a line.  It is