"Popes and ministers," said he, "give important places, not to the first chance-comer, but to a man whom they have narrowly proved, because they have been almost brought up with him, namely, a friend by blood. They have too moral a way of thinking to let them, after their elevation, no longer know their kindred, nor do they hold the court to be a heaven where one never inquires about his fellow-trenchermen condemned to hell. Inasmuch as a minister can digest like an ostrich, one wonders that he does not also, like the ostrich, toss his eggs, full of relatives into the sand under the burning sun, and trust the hatching to accident. But nothing accords less with genuine nepotism than this; nay, the very ostrich, by night and in colder places, broods in person, and only omits it where the sun broods better; so, too, the man of influence provides for his cousins only in those cases where great want of merit requires it. I confess, morality can as little command nepotism as friendships; but the merit is so much the greater, when without any moral obligation one covers, as it were, with his family-tree, half the steps of the throne." This smelting-fume and vapor of satire prepossessed the Britons in his favor, especially as the fume implied noble metals, that is to say, the highest impartiality on the part of a son whose father was minister. While the Apothecary carved the _souper_,--Mat had begged him to act as _grand écuyer tranchant_, his friend watched the moment when he had a great turkey-cock on the fork, to carve him in the air, as herons do fishes, and that, too, in Italian fashion; then the noble page took his way over the partitioned turkey-cock, and Poland, through the Electorates, till he arrived at the hereditary kingdoms, where he stopped to make the remark, that very naturally the first great Dictator will have raised up his own son to sit on his throne after him: "So had he often, at the Flachsenfingen shooting-matches, enjoyed seeing the children dance about with the crowns and sceptres which their fathers had shot down, and toss and play with them." The deaf man maintained by his gauging-rod and linstock, which he pressed against the table, the freest intimacy with the whole club, and watched his laboring brother, to see how he sawed and balanced. Matthieu, who loved the chief-carver, but the truth still more,[16] could not for his sake suppress his reflections upon crowned first-borns, but freely remarked, that "One should at least among the reigning family, if not among the people, have a free choice."