That excellent person Mr. Boyle had formed a different opinion. To be the son of a Peer whose prosperity had found many admirers, but few parallels, and not to be his eldest son, was a happiness that he used to “mention with great expressions of gratitude; his birth, he said, so suiting his inclinations and designs, that, had he been permitted an election, his choice would scarce have altered God's assignment. For as on the one side, a lower birth would have too much exposed him to the inconveniences of a mean descent, which are too notorious to need specifying; so on the other side, to a person whose humour indisposes him to the distracting hurry of the world, the being born heir to a great family is but a glittering kind of slavery, whilst obliging him to a public entangled course of life, to support the credit of his family, and tying him from satisfying his dearest inclinations, it often forces him to build the advantages of his house upon the ruins of his own contentment.” “A man of mean extraction,” he continues, “is seldom admitted to the privacy and secrets of great ones promiscuously, and scarce dares pretend to it, for fear of being censured saucy, or an intruder. And titular greatness is ever an impediment to the knowledge of many retired truths, that cannot be attained without familiarity with meaner persons, and such other condescensions, as fond opinion, in great men, disapproves and makes disgraceful.” “But he himself,” Mr. Boyle said, “was born in a condition that neither was high enough to prove a temptation to laziness, nor low enough to discourage him from aspiring.” And certainly to a person that affected so much an universal knowledge, and arbitrary vicissitudes of quiet and employments, it could not be unwelcome to be of a quality, that was a handsome stirrup to preferment, without an obligation to court it, and which might at once both protect his higher pretensions from the guilt of ambition, and secure his retiredness from contempt. There would be more and higher advantages in high birth than Mr. Boyle apprehended, if the Dean of Chalon, Pierre de St. Julien, were right when he maintained _contre l'opinion des Philosophes, et l'ordinaire des Predicamants,—que la vraye Noblesse a sa source du sang, et est substancielle._ _Ces mots Gentilhomme de sang, et d'armes, de race genereuse, de bonne part,_ &c., says the well-born Dean, who in his title pages let us know that he was _de la maison de Balleurré,—sont termes non de qualité, ny d'habitude; ains importants substance de vray, comme il est bien dit,_ _veniunt cum sanguine mores;_ _et aillieurs,_ _Qui viret in foliis venit à radicibus humor; Sic patrum in natos abeunt cum semine mores._