fact; and how, further, under the Fetish philosophy the celestial bodies are believed to be personages who once lived among men; we see that the appellations of oriental rulers, “Brother to the Sun,” etc., were probably once expressive of a genuine belief; and have simply, like many other things, continued in use after all meaning has gone out of them.  We way infer, too, that the titles, God, Lord, Divinity, were given to primitive rulers literally—­that the nostra divinitas applied to the Roman emperors, and the various sacred designations that have been borne by monarchs, down to the still extant phrase, “Our Lord the King,” are the dead and dying forms of what were once living facts.  From these names, God, Father, Lord, Divinity, originally belonging to the God-king, and afterwards to God and the king, the derivation of our commonest titles of respect is clearly traceable.

There is reason to think that these titles were originally proper names.  Not only do we see among the Egyptians, where Pharaoh was synonymous with king, and among the Romans, where to be Caesar meant to be Emperor, that the proper names of the greatest men were transferred to their successors, and so became class names; but in the Scandinavian mythology we may trace a human title of honour up to the proper name of a divine personage.  In Anglo-Saxon bealdor, or baldor, means Lord; and Balder is the name of the favourite of Odin’s sons—­the gods who with him constitute the Teutonic Pantheon.  How these names of honour became general is easily understood.  The relatives of the primitive kings—­the grandees described by Selden as having names formed on those of the gods, and shown by this to be members of the divine race—­necessarily shared in the epithets, such as Lord, descriptive of superhuman relationships and nature.  Their ever-multiplying offspring inheriting these, gradually rendered them comparatively common.  And then they came to be applied to every man of power:  partly from the fact that, in these early days when men conceived divinity simply as a stronger kind of humanity, great persons could be called by divine epithets with but little exaggeration; partly from the fact that the unusually potent were apt to be considered as unrecognised or illegitimate descendants of “the strong, the destroyer, the powerful one;” and partly, also, from compliment and the desire to propitiate.

Progressively as superstition diminished, this last became the sole cause.  And if we remember that it is the nature of compliment, as we daily hear it, to attribute more than is due—­that in the constantly widening application of “esquire,” in the perpetual repetition of “your honour” by the fawning Irishman, and in the use of the name “gentleman” to any coalheaver or dustman by the lower classes of London, we have current examples of the depreciation of titles consequent on compliment—­and that in barbarous times, when the wish to propitiate