HONOURS—­INVENTIONS.

Authorship reaps honour in these latter days quite as much as it did in the classic times of Augustus with Virgil and Horace for his intimates, and of Petrarch crowned at the Capitol laureate of all Italy during the vacancy of a popedom in the Vatican.  Not but that, with or without any titular distinction, authorship is practically the most noticeable rank amongst us.  Many will pass by a duke who would have stopped and waited to have looked at a Darwin when he was in this lower sphere; and I am quite sure that the grand presence of Alfred Tennyson would attract more affectionate homage than that of any other ennobled magnate in the land.  As to his title, I was glad that his good taste and wisdom elected to be called by his own honourable patronymic rather than haply Farringford or Hazlemere:  how can great names consent to be eclipsed in such obscure signatures as Wantage or Esher, Hindlip or Glossop, Dalling or Grimsthorpe?  One gets quite at a loss to know who’s who.

My letter to the Times of December 19, 1883, headed “Literary Honours,” in praise of Tennyson’s elevation to the House of Lords, and showing how in every age all nations except our own have given honours to authors, literally “from China to Peru,” elicited plenty both of approval and of censure from journals of many denominations.  As a matter inevitable when Baron Tennyson was gazetted, the less euphonious Tupper was stigmatised in the papers as desiring to be a Baron too,—­at all events, the Echo said so, and the Globe good-humouredly observed that “he deserved the coronet.”  They little knew that in the summer of 1863 (as paragraphs in my tenth volume of “Archives” are now before me to show) the same derided scribe was seriously announced as “about to be raised to the peerage” all over England and America:  see two available and respectable proofs in the British Controversialist (Houlston & Wright) for July 1863, p. 79,—­and Bryant’s Evening Post for September 17, 1863.  I name these, as the reverse of comic papers,—­and publishing what they supposed true, as in fact was told me by the editors when inquired of.  At the time I repudiated the false rumour openly;—­with all the greater readiness, inasmuch as I dispute both the justice of hereditary honour and the wisdom of hereditary legislation; to say less of the “res angusta domi” which, in our Mammonite time and clime, obliges money to support rank, even if, as in sundry late cases of raising to the peerage, it does not purchase it.

It is fair also to state as a fact, that when my father for the second time refused his baronetcy, I, as eldest son, gave the casting vote against myself, not to impoverish my four younger brothers,—­all now gone before me to the better world,—­and that, for reasons mentioned above, I certainly could not take it now.  Let this suffice as my reply to some recent sneers and strictures.