As there are families born to command, so are there families born to serve. I know the representatives of one or two highly respectable lines (they are not very fond of me by the way, and never invite me unless some better-bred person has disappointed them--which I also generally manage to do in my turn, one way or another), who can point to splendid galleries of ancestral portraits, each one the counterfeit presentment of an individual who has distinguished himself as the faithful and devoted servant of some royal or otherwise illustrious, personage. One will have been Gold Shaving Pot in Waiting to such a monarch--another Groom of the Dirty Clothes Bag to such another--and so forth. All have worn livery of some kind or another, with pride to themselves and satisfaction to their employers. I honour these men, not as the unthinking do, for the reflected glories cast upon them by the great names with which theirs have been associated, but for their own merits as honest flunkies, who accepted their earthly mission and fulfilled it with diligence and civility; and who, having completed their time of servitude in this down-stairs world, have gone to better themselves elsewhere, provided with the best of characters. There have been great men in these lines--warriors who have won difficult battles as the subservient aides-de-camp to incapable princes; statesmen who have saved or ruined empires, as part of their professional duties* for the immortalization of their honoured employers; gifted authors who have lived to see statues erected to their patrons, due to the fame of books which they themselves had written ungrudgingly for a secretary’s wages or a toady’s perquisites. The offshoots and collaterals of these illustrious houses have doubtless included, in their number, artists of the highest ability, who have passed their lives cheerfully on small salaries, painting backgrounds and draperies, for such of the governing castes as may have drifted into the field of fashionable portraiture and are naturally fitted for command there as elsewhere; mute inglorious Mozarts and Beethovens who have retired contentedly to workhouses, when they have completed their life-labour of preparing some operatic automaton for opulence and fame; and so on, down through grades innumerable, to poor old Figaro, who weeps tears of joy when he hears that the wig his skill has prepared has been mistaken for the natural growth of the Count Almaviva’s bald and wrinkled pate, and Betty, who is reconciled to short commons and irregular wages, when she listens stealthily at the halfopened ball-room door to hear Belinda praised and envied for taste that was Betty’s own. My Lord Gold Stick in Waiting, the Grand Duke’s hereditary Bootjack, Mr. Boswell the biographer, Mr. Wagg the dining-room jester, Mr. Wenham the confidential secretary, faithful Caleb Balderston, and supercilious John Thomas--they are all of the same race. The prosperous may repudiate the unsuccessful members--as