is there about Peacock that we don’t possess.  Strain your neck ever so, you can’t make it as long or as blue as his—­cock your tail as much as you please, and it will never be half so fine to look at.  But the most absurd, disgusting, contemptible sight in the world would you and I be, leaving the barn-door for my lady’s flower-garden, forsaking our natural sturdy walk for the peacock’s genteel rickety stride, and adopting the squeak of his voice in the place of our gallant lusty cock-a-doodle-dooing.

Do you take the allegory?  I love to speak in such, and the above types have been presented to my mind while sitting opposite a gimcrack coat-of-arms and coronet that are painted in the Invalides Church, and assigned to one of the Emperor’s Generals.

Ventrebleu!  Madam, what need have they of coats-of-arms and coronets, and wretched imitations of old exploded aristocratic gewgaws that they had flung out of the country—­with the heads of the owners in them sometimes, for indeed they were not particular—­a score of years before?  What business, forsooth, had they to be meddling with gentility and aping its ways, who had courage, merit, daring, genius sometimes, and a pride of their own to support, if proud they were inclined to be?  A clever young man (who was not of high family himself, but had been bred up genteelly at Eton and the university)—­young Mr. George Canning, at the commencement of the French Revolution, sneered at “Roland the Just, with ribbons in his shoes,” and the dandies, who then wore buckles, voted the sarcasm monstrous killing.  It was a joke, my dear, worthy of a lackey, or of a silly smart parvenu, not knowing the society into which his luck had cast him (God help him! in later years, they taught him what they were!), and fancying in his silly intoxication that simplicity was ludicrous and fashion respectable.  See, now, fifty years are gone, and where are shoebuckles?  Extinct, defunct, kicked into the irrevocable past off the toes of all Europe!

How fatal to the parvenu, throughout history, has been this respect for shoebuckles.  Where, for instance, would the Empire of Napoleon have been, if Ney and Lannes had never sported such a thing as a coat-of-arms, and had only written their simple names on their shields, after the fashion of Desaix’s scutcheon yonder?—­the bold Republican who led the crowning charge at Marengo, and sent the best blood of the Holy Roman Empire to the right-about, before the wretched misbegotten imperial heraldry was born, that was to prove so disastrous to the father of it.  It has always been so.  They won’t amalgamate.  A country must be governed by the one principle or the other.  But give, in a republic, an aristocracy ever so little chance, and it works and plots and sneaks and bullies and sneers itself into place, and you find democracy out of doors.  Is it good that the aristocracy should so triumph?—­that is a question that you may settle according to your