In England, until very late days, we have been accustomed rather to pooh-pooh national Orders, to vote ribbons and crosses tinsel gewgaws, foolish foreign ornaments, and so forth.  It is known how the Great Duke (the breast of whose own coat was plastered with some half-hundred decorations) was averse to the wearing of ribbons, medals, clasps, and the like, by his army.  We have all of us read how uncommonly distinguished Lord Castlereagh looked at Vienna, where he was the only gentleman present without any decoration whatever.  And the Great Duke’s theory was, that clasps and ribbons, stars and garters, were good and proper ornaments for himself, for the chief officers of his distinguished army, and for gentlemen of high birth, who might naturally claim to wear a band of garter blue across their waistcoats; but that for common people your plain coat, without stars and ribbons, was the most sensible wear.

And no doubt you and I are as happy, as free, as comfortable; we can walk and dine as well; we can keep the winter’s cold out as well, without a star on our coats, as without a feather in our hats.  How often we have laughed at the absurd mania of the Americans for dubbing their senators, members of Congress, and States’ representatives, Honorable.  We have a right to call our Privy Councillors Right Honorable, our Lords’ sons Honorable, and so forth; but for a nation as numerous, well educated, strong, rich, civilized, free as our own, to dare to give its distinguished citizens titles of honor—­monstrous assumption of low-bred arrogance and parvenu vanity!  Our titles are respectable, but theirs absurd.  Mr. Jones, of London, a Chancellor’s son, and a tailor’s grandson, is justly Honorable, and entitled to be Lord Jones at his noble father’s decease:  but Mr. Brown, the senator from New York, is a silly upstart for tacking Honorable to his name, and our sturdy British good sense laughs at him.  Who has not laughed (I have myself) at Honorable Nahum Dodge, Honorable Zeno Scudder, Honorable Hiram Boake, and the rest?  A score of such queer names and titles I have smiled at in America.  And, mutato nomine?  I meet a born idiot, who is a peer and born legislator.  This drivelling noodle and his descendants through life are your natural superiors and mine—­your and my children’s superiors.  I read of an alderman kneeling and knighted at court:  I see a gold-stick waddling backwards before Majesty in a procession, and if we laugh, don’t you suppose the Americans laugh too?

Yes, stars, garters, orders, knighthoods, and the like, are folly.  Yes, Bobus, citizen and soap-boiler, is a good man, and no one laughs at him or good Mrs. Bobus, as they have their dinner at one o’clock.  But who will not jeer at Sir Thomas on a melting day, and Lady Bobus, at Margate, eating shrimps in a donkey-chaise?  Yes, knighthood is absurd:  and chivalry an idiotic superstition:  and Sir Walter Manny was a zany:  and Nelson, with his flaming stars and cordons, splendent