If it be asked why these young fellows were always welcomed in London, the answer is ready. First, they came to their relations as the two sons of John Chichele came to their cousins, as Whittington came to his. Next, the great City had then, as it has now, the custom of devouring her children; it must always be recruited with fresh blood; in his energy and strength, stimulated by his poverty and his resolution and his ambition, the country lad easily rises above the Londoner of the second generation, and in his turn produces boys who lack their father’s stimulus, even when they inherit their father’s strength; they cannot compete with the boy from the country. [Illustration: COURT OF KING’S BENCH. TEMP. HENRY VI. From an illumination of the fifteenth century.] In London at this day, in every great town, in every little town, even, the same rapid rise, the same decline and fall, of the middle class goes on perpetually. The successful man has died; the sons throw away or lose what their fathers gained. Look for them in the third generation; they are gone; they are lost in the huge flood of the unknown, the unfortunate, the incapable, the obscure. Perhaps after many generations one may again emerge; he will be ignorant of the past, he will begin a family anew—I please myself when I look down the City lists with thinking that Robert Besaunt, Sheriff in 1195, was perhaps my own ancestor: a theory for which there is no proof at all; the very tradition of that descent, if it is a descent, has long been lost. What has become of the three-and-twenty generations between him and me? I know not; for six hundred years they have been unknown outside the village, outside the town, where they were born, and the nameless mounds that covered their bones have long since been levelled with the grass around, like those of the descendants of Orgar the Proud, Henry of London Stone, the Bukerels, the Hardels, the Haverels, and the Buccointes. There is, however, another point. With the parentage and origin of the Mayors, there are presented, in this edition (see p. 219) of Stow, the arms of every Mayor. The earlier shields, such as that of Fitz Aylwin, we need not regard as authentic. After the thirteenth century, however, there could be no tampering with things heraldic. All the Mayors bore arms. Of course we know that in many cases there could be no doubt about the family arms. Such names suggest themselves as Whittington, Bullen, Chalton, Fielding, Cooke, Jocelyn, Hampton, Colet, Clopton, Percival, Capel, Bradbury, and Gresham. Some of them have on their shields the distinctive signs which mark the younger son. I am indebted to my friend Mr. Loftie for information on this point.