be a shepherdess or a princess.  Well, content yourself, said the giant, you will die an empress, without being either the one or the other!  But what sublime reason had you for lengthening your name so unaccountably?  It is a custom in my family, said she:  all my ancestors were learned men, who wrote about the Romans.  It sounded more classic, and gave a higher opinion of their literature, to put a Latin termination to their names.  All this is Japonese to me, said the emperor; but your ancestors seem to have been a parcel of mountebanks.  Does one understand any thing the better for corrupting one’s name?  Oh, said the princess, but it shewed taste too.  There was a time when in Italy the learned carried this still farther; and a man with a large forehead, who was born on the fifth of January, called himself Quintus Januarius Fronto.  More and more absurd, said the emperor.  You seem to have a great deal of impertinent knowledge about a great many impertinent people; but proceed in your story:  whence came you?  Mynheer, said she, I was born in Holland—­The deuce you was, said the emperor, and where is that?  It was no where, replied the princess, spritelily, till my countrymen gained it from the sea—­Indeed, moppet! said his majesty; and pray who were your countrymen, before you had any country?  Your majesty asks a vey shrewd question, said she, which I cannot resolve on a sudden; but I will step home to my library, and consult five or six thousand volumes of modern history, an hundred or two dictionaries, and an abridgment of geography in forty volumes in folio, and be back in an instant.  Not so fast, my life, said the emperor, you must not rise till you go to execution; it is now one in the morning, and you have not begun your story.

My great grandfather, continued the princess, was a Dutch merchant, who passed many years in Japan—­On what account? said the emperor.  He went thither to abjure his religion, said she, that he might get money enough to return and defend it against Philip 2d.  You are a pleasant family, said the emperor; but though I love fables, I hate genealogies.  I know in all families, by their own account, there never was any thing but good and great men from father to son; a sort of fiction that does not at all amuse me.  In my dominions there is no nobility but flattery.  Whoever flatters me best is created a great lord, and the titles I confer are synonimous to their merits.  There is Kiss-my-breech-Can, my favourite; Adulation-Can, lord treasurer; Prerogative-Can, head of the law; and Blasphemy-Can, high-priest.  Whoever speaks truth, corrupts his blood, and is ipso facto degraded.  In Europe you allow a man to be noble because one of his ancestors was a flatterer.  But every thing degenerates, the farther it is removed from its source.  I will not hear a word of any of your race before your father:  what was he?