I esteem them for it.  Let us not abuse them like envious folks.  I feel happy when a beautiful vision passes.  I have not the light, but I have the reflection.  A reflection thrown on my ulcer, you will say.  Go to the devil!  I am a Job, delighted in the contemplation of Trimalcion.  Oh, that beautiful and radiant planet up there!  But the moonlight is something.  To suppress the lords was an idea which Orestes, mad as he was, would not have dared to entertain.  To say that the lords are mischievous or useless is as much as to say that the state should be revolutionized, and that men are not made to live like cattle, browsing the grass and bitten by the dog.  The field is shorn by the sheep, the sheep by the shepherd.  It is all one to me.  I am a philosopher, and I care about life as much as a fly.  Life is but a lodging.  When I think that Henry Bowes Howard, Earl of Berkshire, has in his stable twenty-four state carriages, of which one is mounted in silver and another in gold—­good heavens!  I know that every one has not got twenty-four state carriages; but there is no need to complain for all that.  Because you were cold one night, what was that to him?  It concerns you only.  Others besides you suffer cold and hunger.  Don’t you know that without that cold, Dea would not have been blind, and if Dea were not blind she would not love you?  Think of that, you fool!  And, besides, if all the people who are lost were to complain, there would be a pretty tumult!  Silence is the rule.  I have no doubt that heaven imposes silence on the damned, otherwise heaven itself would be punished by their everlasting cry.  The happiness of Olympus is bought by the silence of Cocytus.  Then, people, be silent!  I do better myself; I approve and admire.  Just now I was enumerating the lords, and I ought to add to the list two archbishops and twenty-four bishops.  Truly, I am quite affected when I think of it!  I remember to have seen at the tithe-gathering of the Rev. Dean of Raphoe, who combined the peerage with the church, a great tithe of beautiful wheat taken from the peasants in the neighbourhood, and which the dean had not been at the trouble of growing.  This left him time to say his prayers.  Do you know that Lord Marmaduke, my master, was Lord Grand Treasurer of Ireland, and High Seneschal of the sovereignty of Knaresborough in the county of York?  Do you know that the Lord High Chamberlain, which is an office hereditary in the family of the Dukes of Ancaster, dresses the king for his coronation, and receives for his trouble forty yards of crimson velvet, besides the bed on which the king has slept; and that the Usher of the Black Rod is his deputy?  I should like to see you deny this, that the senior viscount of England is Robert Brent, created a viscount by Henry V. The lords’ titles imply sovereignty over land, except that of Earl Rivers, who takes his title from his family name.  How admirable is the right which they have to tax others, and to levy, for instance, four shillings