Oh, ye knights, great and small—whether expanding on the mart, or lying _perdu_ in back parlours—fling from your hearts the Order there, and feel for once the warmth of kindly blood! The brotherhood chuckle at the adjuration. Well, let us fight the Order with an Order. The Order of Poverty against the Order of the Golden Calf! Will it not be a merry time, when men, with a blithe face and open look, shall confess that they are poor? When they shall be to the world what they are to themselves? When the lie, the shuffle, the bland, yet anxious hypocrisy of seeming, and seeming only, shall be a creed forsworn? When Poverty asserts itself, and never blushes and stammers at its true name, the Knights of the Calf must give ground. Much of their strength, their poor renown, their miserable glory, lies in the hypocrisy of those who would imitate them. They believe themselves great, because the poor, in the very ignorance of the dignity of poverty, would ape their magnificence. The Order of Poverty! How many sub-orders might it embrace! As the spirit of Gothic chivalry has its fraternities, so might the Order of Poverty have its distinct devices. The Order of the Thistle! That is an order for nobility—a glory to glorify marquisate or earldom. Can we not, under the rule of Poverty, find as happy a badge? Look at this peasant. His face bronzed with midday toil. From sunrise to sunset, with cheerful looks and uncomplaining words, he turns the primal curse to dignity, and manfully earns his bread in the sweat of his brow. Look at the fields around! Golden with blessed corn. Look at this bloodless soldier of the plough—this hero of the sickle. His triumphs are there, piled up in bread-bestowing sheaves. Is he not Sir Knight of the Wheat-Ear? Surely, as truly dubbed in the heraldry of justice, as any Knight of the Thistle. And here is a white-haired shepherd. As a boy, a child, playful as the lambs he tended, he laboured. He has dreamed away his life upon a hillside—on downs—on solitary heaths. The humble, simple, patient watcher for fellow-men. Solitude has been his companion: he has grown old, wrinkled, bent in the eye of the burning sun. His highest wisdom is a guess at the coming weather: he may have heard of diamonds, but he knows the evening star. He has never sat at a congress of kings: he has never helped to commit a felony upon a whole nation. Yet is he to our mind a most reverend Knight of the Fleece. If the Herald object to this, let us call him Knight of the Lamb! In its gentleness and patience, a fitting type of the poor old shepherd.