The structure, economy and polity of our time do not incline the meek and lowly to a particular regard for persons of condition. Nor is the patronage of princes and the favour of lords solicited to any noticeable degree by the poets and scientists of the day. The most superficial survey of history will discover that the condescension of a gentleman of the _haut ton_ was once regarded as almost an essential of a poet’s success: while the craftsman, was he never so cunning and exquisite, must rely for his fame on the caprice of the young men of fashion, who were, it is to be presumed, not the less generous because they were invariably in debt and had not the worse taste because they were nearly always in wine. In our generation, however, we have progressed so far in the liberal arts that, should a man of letters so mask himself with the impertinence of fashion as to be remarked at Ascot in clothes which, with a deplorable want of faith in the dignity of letters, have been cut to fit his person, he shall at once be convicted by all really intelligent people of a lack of feeling for all that is genuine in art and literature. That cannot be altogether just. An effeminate manner and unusual habits should not, on the other hand, invariably be taken for sure signs of genius in the mental sciences; and laymen should be warned against regarding soiled linen as an essential of the successful ascent of Parnassus. In the face of this illiberal attitude towards the upper sort, the popular interest in the young Duke of Mall is the more surprising; and to that gentleman’s familiars and dependents it has for long been a source of gratification to observe how the esteem in which he is held by the people of England is rivalled only by the interest shown in the table-manners of the most famous pugilists and the respect extended to the tireless energies of the most beloved prince in Christendom. Nor was the young Duke’s greatness unheralded, his birth without good omen: historians the world over will know the legend of the Dukedom of Mall, how it was prophesied by a sibyl of the Restoration that on the birth of the greatest of that house the golden cock on the weather-vane of St. James’s tower would crow thrice, and on his death it would also crow thrice. And only those most steeped in the modern vice of scepticism will disbelieve the unanimous evidence of every club servant in St. James’s Street, that this miracle attended the birth of the seventeenth Duke; while we vulgar lovers of England’s might and enemies to the Socialist tyranny can only pray that the second manifestation of that miracle be averted for the longest span of God’s mercy to the most gallant of His creatures.