I. He would do great service to the nobility, who could separate their vanity from their quality; for it is almost as difficult to find this dignity free from that vice, as it is to find silver in the mines without a mixture of earth. Splendour of ancestry is a fire, which produces much smoke in descendants. There is nothing of which people should be less vain than their high origin, and there is nothing of which they are more so. The best pens in all ages, both sacred and profane, have laboured to persuade, that there is no pride worse founded than that which is built upon high birth. The world perseveres in its error, and there is no flattery better received, than that which compliments a man on the grandeur of his race; nor is there any adulation more hacknied and transcendent; to be convinced of which, you need only read epistles dedicatory to books. Flattery in them, commonly guides the pen, and you will hardly find one, which omits to lay great stress on the nobleness and antiquity of the family of the person to whom he consigns the protection of his book; and they do this, because it is pretty well known, there is scarce any man so candid or modest, as not to be pleased with this eulogium. II. From hence spring those wild and extravagant genealogies, fabricated by some flatterers, in order to compliment, and by that means, cultivate the favour and protection of great and powerful people. Basil the first, emperor of the East, was a man of obscure birth. The patriarch Phocio, finding himself out of his good graces, endeavoured to regain his favour, by forming a genealogical chain, which made him descended from Tiridates king of Armenia, who reigned in that country eight centuries anterior to Basil. The descent which Abraham Bzovius gives to pope Sylvester the second, which began in Timenus king of Argos, who flourished more than a thousand years before Christ, in all likelihood was not fabricated by Bzovius, but was probably found among some papers written in the life-time of that pope, by some person who composed the thing to flatter him. Roderig Flaharti wrote, a little while since, the history of some transactions relating to Ireland, in which he assigns two thousand seven hundred years of antiquity to the kings of England in their possession of the throne.