I should uncommonly like to be a Knight of the Garter?" If such there be, let him forswear this column and pass on to the Cotton Market or the Education Bill. Here we cater for those in whom the historic instinct is combined with picturesque sensibility, and who love to trace the stream of the national life as it flows through long-descended rites. Lord Acton wrote finely of "Institutions which incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the dead." No institution fulfils this ideal more absolutely than the Order of the Garter. One need not always "commence with the Deluge"; and there is no occasion to consult the lively oracles of Mrs. Markham for the story of the dropped garter and the chivalrous motto. It is enough to remember that the Order links the last enchantments of the Middle Age with the Twentieth Century, and that for at least four hundred years it has played a real, though hidden, part in the secret strategy of English Statecraft. We are told by travellers that the Emperor of Lilliput rewarded his courtiers with three fine silken threads of about six inches long, one of which was blue, one red, and one green. The method by which these rewards were obtained is thus described by an eye-witness: "The Emperor holds a stick in his hands, both ends parallel to the horizon, while the candidates, advancing one by one, sometimes leap over it, sometimes creep under it, backwards and forwards, several times, according as the stick is elevated or depressed. Whoever shows the most agility and performs his part best of leaping and creeping is rewarded with the blue coloured silk, the next with the red, and so on."