Do you know, you ridiculous boy, that William North, who is Lord Grey of Rolleston, and sits fourteenth on the bench of Barons, has more forest trees on his mountains than you have hairs on your horrible noddle?  Do you know that Lord Norreys of Rycote, who is Earl of Abingdon, has a square keep a hundred feet high, having this device—­Virtus ariete fortior; which you would think meant that virtue is stronger than a ram, but which really means, you idiot, that courage is stronger than a battering-machine.  Yes, I honour, accept, respect, and revere our lords.  It is the lords who, with her royal Majesty, work to procure and preserve the advantages of the nation.  Their consummate wisdom shines in intricate junctures.  Their precedence over others I wish they had not; but they have it.  What is called principality in Germany, grandeeship in Spain, is called peerage in England and France.  There being a fair show of reason for considering the world a wretched place enough, heaven felt where the burden was most galling, and to prove that it knew how to make happy people, created lords for the satisfaction of philosophers.  This acts as a set-off, and gets heaven out of the scrape, affording it a decent escape from a false position.  The great are great.  A peer, speaking of himself, says we.  A peer is a plural.  The king qualifies the peer consanguinei nostri.  The peers have made a multitude of wise laws; amongst others, one which condemns to death any one who cuts down a three-year-old poplar tree.  Their supremacy is such that they have a language of their own.  In heraldic style, black, which is called sable for gentry, is called saturne for princes, and diamond for peers.  Diamond dust, a night thick with stars, such is the night of the happy!  Even amongst themselves these high and mighty lords have their own distinctions.  A baron cannot wash with a viscount without his permission.  These are indeed excellent things, and safeguards to the nation.  What a fine thing it is for the people to have twenty-five dukes, five marquises, seventy-six earls, nine viscounts, and sixty-one barons, making altogether a hundred and seventy-six peers, of which some are your grace, and some my lord!  What matter a few rags here and there, withal:  everybody cannot be dressed in gold.  Let the rags be.  Cannot you see the purple?  One balances the other.  A thing must be built of something.  Yes, of course, there are the poor—­what of them!  They line the happiness of the wealthy.  Devil take it! our lords are our glory!  The pack of hounds belonging to Charles, Baron Mohun, costs him as much as the hospital for lepers in Moorgate, and for Christ’s Hospital, founded for children, in 1553, by Edward VI.  Thomas Osborne, Duke of Leeds, spends yearly on his liveries five thousand golden guineas.  The Spanish grandees have a guardian appointed by law to prevent their ruining themselves.  That is cowardly.  Our lords are extravagant and magnificent.