THE RISE OF GREAT FAMILIES.* SIR BERNARD BURKE has illustrated
his office by several con- tributions to the romance of history. His Extinct Peerages is an interesting and suggestive volume, out of whose contents scores of novels might be made, in most cases with but moderate exertion of imagination in aid of truth, and in many in such mitigation of it as would induce a favourable reception of the works by the public who have no taste for tragedy. In his Vicissi- tudes of Families many of the dry bones are clothed with flesh, and how the mighty are fallen is set forth with impressive plain- ness. It is a melancholy book, but deeply interesting, with its tracing of individual figures through the press and the hurry of general history, its holding fast to their skirts through the shifting scenes of their career, its dogging them to disaster, death, defeat, insignificance, or oblivion.
The Rise of Great Families is the other side of the romance of history, treated in a similar way, and though slighter in composi- tion and less various in its interest, because it is concerned chiefly with the sunny aide of the fortunes of its subjects, it is pleasant and curious reading. The herald king has been wandering among his records like Thomson among his peach trees, and has picked out bright and prosperous incidents as the sentimental epicure picked out the sun-ripened bits of the rich fruit. They are strikingly put together, and they furnish a chit-chat commentary upon the contemporary history of many wearers of great names, which appeals to curiosity, and even to a finer, more philosophical sentiment.
Sir Bernard Burke is a capital raconteur, though, like all specialists, he is apt to take it for granted that his readers know a great deal more than they do about the subject upon which he knows everything, and he is sometimes in consequence too chary of explanation in matters purely heraldic. In the present in- stance, though too " magaziny," he has selected and arranged his materials equally well, apportioning a fair share in the historic recollections which he records to England, Ireland, and Scotland respectively. He is indignant at the idea that the English aristocracy should be supposed to be deficient in antiquity of lineage, and proposes to meet Mr. Disraeli on that issue, in a passage which reminds one of the charming discussion between Mrs. ‘Dashwood and her daughters, in Miss Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Mrs. Dashwoods- and Marianne vehemently contend for the superiority of modest com- petence, Elinor prefers wealth, and is much condemned until it is discovered that her estimate of wealth falls considerably short of her mother's and sister's standard of competence. Mr. Disraeli's and Sir Bernard Burke's notions of an ancient lineage would pro- bably bear a somewhat analogous proportion. Ulster might be satisfied with Malachi, but Mr. Disraeli would insist on Maccabmus; so that they are both right, the one when he affirms that "the Peers are of ancient lineage," the other when he makes Mr. Millbank say, "a Peer with an ancient lineage is to me a novelty." Sir Bernard gives a long list, in support of his vindication of the Peerage from the charge of new blood, and from it takes a few names, of which he says :—" The sound of them is the echo of the war-trumpet of the middle ages." He gives due precedence to the "four centuries of ducal rank and eight centuries of unsullied ancestry associated with the name of Howard," with their frightful commentaries of royal alliances and violent deaths, their nineteen Knights of the Garter and their twenty distinct peerages, the results of "a spring from simple chivalry to ducal position," a history more grand and tragic than any other English house has to chronicle.
Then comes the story of Douglas, the name which is to Scotland what Howard is to England, and Geraldine and Butler are to Ireland, followed by some curious instances of the influence which heiresses have had on the rise of ourgreat houses, especially in the case of the ducal house of Athole, whose representative, in right of his descent from heiresses, has a shield of more than a thousand quarterings. On the other hand, the Grahams have found no such favour, and the Duke of Montrose's shield has no quartering. For two-thirds of the 570 Peers and Peeresses now existing Sir Bernard Burke claims ancient lineage, illustrated by noble achievement. The roll, as he calls it over, has a grand sound, and many of the old stories connected with the old names are curious and interesting. The feuds of the great houses form a lively chapter, beginning with the celebrated strife between Scrope and Grosvenor, when Geoffery Chaucer was called before the Court of the Lord High Constable as a witness ; the more friendly rivalry between Lord Spencer and the Marquis of Blandford for the possession of
* The Rise of Great Families; other Essays and Stories. By Sir Bernard Burke, C.B, LL.D., Ulster Bing of Arms. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Boccaccio's Decamerone, which terminated in the purchase of the book by the Marquis for £2,300; and the controversy between Edward, Lord Stafford, and Mr. Begot, of Blithfleld, in the six- teenth century. Clan Chattan, O'Conor, aud the Jones-Herbert controversies find merition here, and their points of dispute being naturally regarded by Ulster with a perfect seriousness, slightly comic to the unheraldic mind, the reader finds himself turning into a partisan during their perusal. Here is a charming anecdote,
which we do not remember to have seen in print before Sir John Schaw, of Greenock, a Whig, lost a hawk, supposed to have been shot by Bruce, of Clackmannan, a Jacobite. In Sir John's absence, Lady Greenock sent Mr. Bruce a letter, with an offer of her intercession, on Mr. Bruce's signing a very strongly-worded apology. His reply was :—' For the honoured hands of Dame Margaret Schaw, of Greenock :—Madame,—I did not shoot the hawk. But sooner than have made such an apology as your Lady- ship has had the consideration to dictate, I would have shot the hawk, Sir John Schaw, and your Ladyship.—I arn, Madame, your Ladyship's devoted servant to command, Clackmannan."
The perplexities of precedence furnish Sir Bernard with material for a pleasant chapter, but one which yields in attraction to a narrative of the ancient glories of Dublin Castle in the dead-and- gone days of Stanhope, Chesterfield, and Harrington, when "the Lady Lieutenant" had a prescribed etiquette of - the most pre- tentious description, and the orders were strict as to the lighting of "a few candles only in the Presence Chamber, Privy Chamber, and Drawing Room, the remainder of the candles to be lighted up when the grooms find the ladies coming." Those were the days of dancing " high and disposedly," in the presence of their Excellencies "within the Bar," and the solicitude displayed in an old MS. programme of private belle for the sacred preservation of the "Red Benches" is highly entertaining. "Before the Ball Room is opened for ladies, four Battleaxes are to be posted, with orders not to suffer any ladies on the Red Benches but such as shall be placed there by the Lady Lieutenant, Gentleman Usher, or Gentlemen at large. The Gentlemen at large are to attend the ladies from the Battleaxe Guard Room into the Ball Room, and place them, taking care not to let any but ladies of quality sit on the Red Benches." Those must have been fine times when Lord Chesterfield wrote home that the only "dangerous Papist" he had met in Ireland was Miss Ambrose, a sobriquet borne by that sparkling queen of beauty ever afterwards ; and a Dublin newspaper announced her marriage in 1752, in terms in which we find the origin of one of the wittiest and most impertinent of well-known sayings :— "The celebrated Miss Ambrose, of this kingdom," says the enthusiastic print, "has, to the much-envied happiness of one and the grief of thousands, abdicated her maiden empire of beauty, and retreated to the Temple of Hymen. Her husband is Roger Palmer, Esq., of Castle Jackson, Co. Mayo, M.P."
"Fragments of Family and Personal History, and Historical Picture Galleries," are full of the interest which attaches to getting at the individuals who make up the crowds of the great world- Sir Bernard Burke has not been able altogether to exclude the sad element from this book. It comes out strongly in the romance of the Aberdeen peerage, and the story of Pamela. In the latter case, we observe with pleasure that he passes over as beneath "notice the slander which accused Lady Edward Fitzgerald of having betrayed the secret of her husband's retreat. That could not have been true, even of Egalitti's daughter.
One of the moot points in modern history is the birth-place of the Duke of Wellington. Sir Bernard Burke has collected all the evidence, hearsay and documentary, which bears upon the subject, and decides, we think with reason, in favour of Mornington House, Upper Merrion Street, Dublin. A large number of celebrated persons, great in station or individually remarkable, flit before the reader in this book, which tacks itself on to the writer's graver works and to heavier history in an illustrative, suggestive, realistic way, both useful and amusing.
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