powers, and repeated, parrot-like, the answers which he had been taught to give; how he travelled through the land in a wagon drawn by a yoke of oxen, with a clownish herdsman for his charioteer, and thus made his appearance when his presence was required at the palace or at the yearly assemblies of the people; but how for the greater part of the year he abode at one small villa in the country, living on its produce, eked out by a scanty grant from his prime minister, and having in truth nothing that he could call his own save his royal title, his long flowing hair, and his pendulous beard, which were the marks of his kingly state. Doubtless it is not only the constitutional sovereign who is obliged to content himself with only a small share of actual power. The despot also, if he wishes to have any enjoyment of life, must leave much to be done by his ministers, who, whatever show of deference they may yield to his judgment, will practically decide for themselves the great mass of administrative questions that come before them. Thus Louis XIII. had his Richelieu; thus the Sultan of Turkey has his Grand Vizier; thus, till our own day, the Mikado of Japan had his Shogun, whom European travellers wrote about by his Chinese title of Tycoon. The relation of these last regents to the royal dynasty in whose name they ruled for many centuries, while depriving them of every shred of actual power, seems to furnish the closest parallel in all history to the relation of the Frankish _major domus_ to the Merovingian king. The origin and early stages of the growth of the power of the “mayor of the palace” (our usual English translation of the title _major domus_) form one of the most difficult subjects in Frankish history. Perhaps the greatest difficulty is to understand why it is that no Teutonic name of an office which was certainly not Roman but Teutonic should have survived in history. An opinion which has found some powerful supporters is that the office was the same which was called by the Germans _seneschal_, “the oldest servant” in the palace, and that as the last part of this word denoted a servile condition, the more respectful Latin term _major domus_ was adopted instead of it. This opinion is, however, as powerfully opposed, and certainly the fact that both _major domus_ and _seniscalcus_ are found in the same documents as titles of apparently different offices seems to throw a doubt upon its correctness.