garlanded like Ariadne's crown; and is it not better to have had this idea all through life--to have caught but glimpses of it, to have known it but in a dream--than to have been born a lord ten times over, with twenty pampered menials at one's beck, and twenty descents to boast of? It is the envy of certain privileges, the sharp privations we have undergone, the cutting neglect we have met with from the want of birth or title that gives its zest to the distinction: the thing itself may be indifferent or contemptible enough. It is the _becoming_ a lord that is to be desired; but he who becomes a lord in reality may be an upstart--a mere pretender, without the sterling essence; so that all that is of any worth in this supposed transition is purely imaginary and impossible.[7] Kings are so accustomed to look down on all the rest of the world, that they consider the condition of mortality as vile and intolerable, if stripped of royal state, and cry out in the bitterness of their despair, 'Give me a crown, or a tomb!' It should seem from this as if all mankind would change with the first crowned head that could propose the alternative, or that it would be only the presumption of the supposition, or a sense of their own unworthiness, that would deter them. Perhaps there is not a single throne that, if it was to be filled by this sort of voluntary metempsychosis, would not remain empty. Many would, no doubt, be glad to 'monarchise, be feared, and kill with looks' in their own persons and after their own fashion: but who would be the _double_ of those shadows of a shade--those 'tenth transmitters of a foolish face'--Charles X. and Ferdinand VII.? If monarchs have little sympathy with mankind, mankind have even less with monarchs. They are merely to us a sort of state-puppets, or royal wax-work, which we may gaze at with superstitious wonder, but have no wish to become; and he who should meditate such a change must not only feel by anticipation an utter contempt for the _slough_ of humanity which he is prepared to cast, but must feel an absolute void and want of attraction in those lofty and incomprehensible sentiments which are to supply its place. With respect to actual royalty, the spell is in a great measure broken. But, among ancient monarchs, there is no one, I think, who envies Darius or Xerxes. One has a different feeling with respect to Alexander or Pyrrhus; but this is because they were great men as well as great kings, and the soul is up in arms at the mention of their names as at the sound of a trumpet. But as to all the rest--those 'in the catalogue who go for kings'--the praying, eating, drinking, dressing monarchs of the earth, in time past or present--one would as soon think of wishing to personate the Golden Calf, or to turn out with Nebuchadnezzar to graze, as to be transformed into one of that 'swinish multitude.' There is no point of affinity. The extrinsic circumstances are imposing; but, within, there is nothing but morbid