LORD EVERGREEN 221 



quence, called precedence, arranged in her head. She knows 

 what ring of the ladder the Lord Pri\y Seal holds, as also the 

 legitimate consequence of a knight banneret, and the place 

 of the eldest son of a knight grand cross of St. Michael and 

 St. George. In fact the old fool is peerage mad, though how she 

 came to be " bit " nobody knows ; for though in her occasional 

 west-end rambles she sees people riding in coroneted coaches 

 whom she takes to be lords, she has never yet accomplished an 



identity so as to be able to say that is the Duke of A or 



that the Marquis of B — . True, that in her ruminating 



mind, with the aid of her books, assisted sometimes by Madame 

 Tussaud's exhibition, she shadows forth certain ideal person- 

 ages for her titles, nay, sometimes assigns the creations of her 

 mind to corporeal objects ; but she is generally as wide of the 

 mark as the celebrated would-be Countess Ferrers* was in her 

 descriptions of the noblemen and great people with whom her 

 intended liege lord associated. We remember being victimized 

 b}' our venerable relative down St. James's-street, one after- 

 noon, when she insisted that a certain duke was Sir Francis 

 Burdett, merely because he wore top-boots ; and Madame 

 Tussaud"s Sir Francis wears them also ; while every big, burly, 

 bushy-wigged man she christened Daniel O'Connell. We met 

 si.\ Daniel O'Connells between Sam's corner and Slaughter's 

 coffee-house in St. Martin's-lane. O'Connell, we may tell him, 

 may take it as a compliment, for we never knew our cousin, 

 Miss Crustyface, descend to a commoner before. It was all 

 owing to his generous breadth of shoulder and the fine dark 

 cauliflower wig he sports in Madame Tussaud's exhibition, 



* The most extraordinary action of modern, or perhaps any times, was 

 one brought by a Miss Smith, a girl of twenty, against Lord Ferrers, for an 

 alleged breach of promise of marriage ; which she sought to establish by a 

 series of letters, supposed to have been written by herself to herself. After 

 the trial had lasted four days, the Solicitor-General submitted to a non-suit. 

 —See Pickering's Report, in i vol. 



