In Anglo-Saxon _bealdor_, or _baldor_, means _Lord_; and Balder is the name of the favourite of Odin’s sons. 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 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 those 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. As superstition diminished, this last became the sole cause. And if we remember that it is the nature of compliment, to attribute more than is due—that in the ever 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 was stronger than now, this effect must have been greater; we shall see that there naturally arose from this cause an extensive misuse of all early distinctions. Hence the facts that the Jews called Herod a god; that _Father_, in its higher sense, was a term used among them by servants to masters; that _Lord_ was applicable to any person of worth and power. Hence, too, the fact that, in the later periods of the Roman Empire, every man saluted his neighbour as {14} _Dominus_ or _Rex_. But it is in the titles of the middle ages, and in the growth of our modern ones out of them, that the process is most clearly seen. _Herr_, _Don_, _Signor_, _Seigneur_, _Señor_, were all originally descriptive names of rulers. By the complimentary use of these names to all who could, on any pretence, be supposed to merit them, and by successive descents to still lower grades, they have come to be common forms of address. At first the phrase in which a serf accosted his despotic chief, _mein Herr_ is now familiarly applied in Germany to ordinary people. The Spanish title _Don_, once proper to noblemen and gentlemen only, is now accorded to all classes. So, too, is it with _Signor_ in Italy. _Seigneur_ and _Monseigneur_, by contraction in _Sieur_ and _Monsieur_, have produced the term of respect claimed by every Frenchman. And whether _Sire_ be or be not a like contraction of _Signor_, it is clear that, as it was borne by sundry of the ancient feudal lords of France, who, as Selden