There they hang; rows of them. Grave-faced, dignified personages, whom not all the feminine frippery that characterised masculine costume in Elizabethan, Carolean, and Jacobean times can make look foolish. They look responsible persons, weighted with the mellow gravity that could not well be absent in times when the headsman’s axe was an institution. But they could not _all_ be so wise as they look; something—and that not in small or grudging measure—must be due to courtly palettes. The thought is treason towards the Muse of History, of course; but surely _we_ of this day, rich as we are in the little tin gods of politics, have not the monopoly of them, and may find an invertebrate Balfour or so amid these reverend seigneurs who look so inscrutably wise. XX The Dukes of Dorset were not merely men with titles; they were ducal Dukes, who lived up to their strawberry-leaves, and had a ducal way with them; were dukes first and men a very long way after. There are none such now. The mould is broken, the recipe forgotten, the pattern mislaid. How sad! That must be a degenerate age whose dukes are so uncharacteristic of their order; whose aldermen, who macerate on charcoal biscuits, are lean dyspeptics, talk art criticism, and shudder at the idea of a banquet; who are no longer those rotund, well-larded figures of convention that drank incredible quantities of fruity port and turtle-soup. That must be an effete generation whose new-rich no longer strew their way with dropped aitches; whose paupers, instead of skilly, dine royally off the best joints, and eat the finest bread, and when they ask for more—get it. In short, your typical pauper, millionaire, alderman, or duke no longer exists in real life. Even the novelists have learned their lesson and know better. Only on the stage shall you find those outmoded figures still strutting, and even _there_ they are on their last legs. The stage is the last ditch of convention; but the time is at hand when some dramatist will give us a stout and haughty workhouse inmate, a humble and cringing duke, and an alderman virtuoso; and he will be quite as loudly hailed for an emancipator as ever was Robertson. The Dukes of Dorset lived up to the fine alliteration of their title, and when that became impossible, they died out, like the oxyrhincus and the mastodon, who could not survive their environment. There is scarce a modern duke who, in the spectacular way, is worthy his title. Some are bored men and commonplace; most of them “splendidly null,” as Tennyson might say. I know an undersized duke with a limp and a falsetto voice, who takes photographs with a hand-camera and an apologetic manner; and another with the appearance and carriage of an unsuccessful commercial traveller. They would be ashamed to be ducal in their behaviour; and it is quite certain that their forbears would be ashamed of them.