"Peerage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over his broad and ample chest there fell the triangular shield of the period, whereon were emblazoned his arms—argent, a gules wavy, on a saltire reversed of the second: the latter device was awarded for a daring exploit before Ascalon, by the Emperor Maximilian, and a reference to the German Peerage of that day, or a knowledge of high families which every gentleman then possessed, would have sufficed to show at once that the rider we have described was of the noble house of Hombourg. It was, in fact, the gallant knight Sir Ludwig of Hombourg: his ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cheque-book. They do not whisper with unsavoury slyness that such and such a man was "seen" going into a bank. I am quite convinced that the English aristocracy is the curse of England, but I have not noticed either in myself or others any disposition to ostracise a man simply for accepting a peerage, as the modern Puritans would certainly ostracise him (from any of their positions of trust) for accepting a drink. The sentiment is certainly very largely a mystical one, like the sentiment about the seventh ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... that lawyer; perhaps they wanted to work upon his paternal feelings, to get money out of him? That was what it all meant. He took alarm. He went over to the cradle and fondled the child, who held out both little arms to him. No heir to an English peerage could be more tenderly cared for than this little one in that house of trouble; his little embroidered cap was ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... Japan, where they received a courteous welcome, being promoted to positions of trust and admitted to the ranks of the nobility. Thus a book (the Seishi-roku), published in 814, which has been aptly termed the "peerage of Japan," shows that, at that time, nearly one-third of the Japanese nobility traced their descent to Chinese or Korean ancestors in something like equal proportions. The numbers are, China, 162 families; Kudara, 104; Koma, 50; Mimana, 9; Shiragi, 9; doubtful, 47. Total, 381 Chinese ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... as successfully as the advance, and before the end of the month of June the last man of the expedition had departed from Annesley Bay. The larger body returned to India, while the Commander-in-chief sailed in the Feroze for England. A peerage, a Grand Cross of the Bath, and a pension were conferred upon Sir Robert Napier; and two Knight Commanderships and 27 Companionships of the same order were bestowed on other officers; while 15 colonelcies, 18 ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... hand;[2] Where lips, till sixty, shed no honey, And Grandams were worth any money,) Our Sultan has much riper notions— So, let your list of she-promotions Include those only plump and sage, Who've reached the regulation-age; That is, (as near as one can fix From Peerage ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... looked upon as the oracle of the peerage in the science of political economy, accuses railroads of injuring shipping, and it is certainly true that the most perfect means of attaining an object must always limit the use of a less perfect means. But railways ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... William Bohun, a younger son of the Humphrey slain at Boroughbridge, became Earl of Northampton, an Ufford, Earl of Suffolk, a Clinton Earl of Huntingdon, a Hastings Earl of Pembroke, and Henry of Grosmont, the Earl of Lancaster's first born, Earl of Derby. A new rank was added to the English peerage when the king's little son, Earl of Chester in 1333, was made Duke of Cornwall in 1337. The old feuds seemed dead and with them the old disorder. But Edward was ambitious of military glory, and it ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... wet in the thick dust of the road. They had flat wooden crosses inside each pail, which floated on the top and (we were instructed) served to prevent the water from slopping over. We used to wonder by what magic this strange principle worked, and who first invented the crosses, and whether he got a peerage for it. But indeed the well was a centre of mystery, for a hornet's nest was somewhere hard by, and the very thought was fearsome. Wasps we knew well and disdained, storming them in their fastnesses. But these great Beasts, vestured in angry orange, three stings from which—so 't ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... safety ... Every day has its evil, every circumstance its law, every man his own nature; mine is not that of an angel. When peace is made, we shall see." On another occasion, on this same question of preparing the Additional Act, and with reference to the institution of an hereditary peerage, he yielded to the excursive rapidity of his mind, taking the subject by turns under different aspects, and giving unlimited vent to contradictory observations and opinions. "Hereditary peerage," said he, "is opposed to the present state of public opinion; it will ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... latter city. Later he was professor of surgery at Glasgow, at Edinburgh, and at King's College Hospital, London, and surgeon to Queen Victoria. He was made a baronet in 1883; retired from teaching in 1893; and was raised to the peerage in 1897, with the ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... who did the business of Chancery as well as such business can be done under the present system, to retire upon half allowance, in order to make room for one Sir William Fullhat, who had no objection to L14,000 a year and a peerage. They were about to fill two sub-chancellorships, which they would not on any account allow the company in the present actual possession of the estates to fill up with a couple of their own shareholders; and were, in fine, proceeding to dispose of, by open sale, and by private contract, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... to convince the Committee that shipowners in general were in no sense profiteers. He failed, however, to avert the wrath of Mr. DENNISS, who declared that if, after what had been revealed, any shipowner was made a peer, he should move to abolish the peerage. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various
... from the expression of their faces how they had employed the forenoon. They had been inspecting the Campden Hill house! Her mother's handsome face wore a look of frozen contempt. Imagine a strict Quaker's feelings on seeing his son with a pair of black eyes—a Socialist's at finding a peerage under his daughter's pillow—a Positivist's whose children have all joined the Salvation Army, and even then but a faint idea will be reached of Mrs. Hylton's utter dismay ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... I grew angry, I could not help it, and told him I thought it was shameful to make money wrongfully out of the country at such a time, especially when he did not want it at all. Then he was furious and answered that he did want it, to support the peerage which he was going to get. He said also," she added slowly, "that I was 'an ignorant, interfering vixen,' yes, that is what he called me, a vixen, who had always been a disappointment to him and thwarted his plans. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... he drew his wife into the parlor to break the glorious news to her. She was more hilarious than he had been. All their financial problems were solved and their social position enhanced, as if the family had suddenly been elevated to the peerage. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... delivered in London, before drawing-room audiences, comprising representatives of literature, art, fashion, and the peerage,—audiences inclusive of the most notable people in London, the nine lectures that are published under the title of "The Perfect Way," and at the time these lectures inspired a profound interest. Their central ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... as the man to whom, above all others, England owes the establishment of her empire in India. Born in 1725 in Shropshire, he was raised to the Irish peerage in 1760 as Baron Clive of Plassey. The son of a poor country squire, at eighteen he entered the service of the East ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... made count and peer of France, expected, no doubt, to transfer to his son, then thirty years of age, his electoral succession, in order to make him some day eligible for the peerage. Already a major on the staff and a great favorite of the prince-royal, Charles Keller, now a viscount, belonged to the court party of the citizen-king. The most brilliant future seemed pledged to a young man enormously rich, full of energy, already remarkable for his devotion to the new dynasty, ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... 'was in speculation a strong republican and did not conceal it. He often made hereditary monarchy and aristocracy the subjects of his keen pleasantry, while he was fighting the battles of the court and obtaining for himself step after step in the peerage.' We are perfectly familiar with this type, both in men who have, and men who have not, such brilliant parts as Halifax. Such men profess to nourish high ideals of life, of character, of social institutions. Yet they never think ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... whether debts sequestrated by the Virginia Legislature during the war came under this treaty. It is said that the Countess of Huntingdon heard the speeches on this case, and said that every one of the lawyers, if in England, would have been given a peerage. Patrick Henry broke his voice down in this case, and never again could speak with his old force. Marshall surpassed them all in the cogency of his reasoning. At that time he was thought to be rather lazy. He went into the State Legislature in ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... say, through all the texture of English life. Among those who have been principally exposed to it are the servants,—especially butlers and chauffeurs, hotel porters, bell-boys, railway porters and guards, all taxi-drivers, pew-openers, curates, bishops, and a large part of the peerage. ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... had been in either country a nobility—it was and remains a common error that the British peers were noble—neither in law nor custom were there noble families, and we altogether lacked the edification one found in Russia, for example, of a poor nobility. A peerage was an hereditary possession that, like the family land, concerned only the eldest sons of the house; it radiated no luster of noblesse oblige. The rest of the world were in law and practice common—and all America was common. But through the private ownership of land that ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Voltairian—he renounced horsemanship, and Liberalism. Although he was a simple deputy, he had a twinge of democracy now and then; but after he was invested with the peerage, he felt sure from that moment that the human species had no more ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... that Life Peerages are wanted specially to represent those forms of national eminence which cannot otherwise find fitting representation, it might be urged, for the reasons we have before mentioned, that a Life Peerage is due to the most truly national representative of one important department of modern English literature. Something may no doubt be said in favour of this view, but we are inclined to doubt if Mr. Dickens himself would gain anything by a Life Peerage. Mr. Dickens is ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... she, "I think of what is gone, and remember your companions, who are dead. Never was lady of my peerage, however fair and good and gracious, ever loved by four such valiant gentlemen, nor ever lost them in one single day. Save you—who were so maimed and in such peril—all are gone. Therefore I call to mind those who loved me so dearly, and am the saddest lady beneath the ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... express purpose of extorting concessions in favour of themselves by bringing the process of legislation to a stand: the sovereign, in that case, must either submit to the terms of the refractory nobles, or by prerogative create a new peerage from the plebean ranks. Such, on a minute scale and in a simple form, was the course adopted by the king in this ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... mongoose. In England any person below the Heir who is caught with a rabbit in his possession must satisfactorily explain how it got there, or he will suffer fine and imprisonment, together with extinction of his peerage; in Bluff, the cat found with a rabbit in its possession does not have to explain—everybody looks the other way; the person caught noticing would suffer fine and imprisonment, with extinction of peerage. This is a sure way to undermine the moral fabric of a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... like Semele, was not void of ambition, and would have preferred Jupiter in all his glory to the same deity in the disguise of an humble shepherd. He dressed himself, therefore, in the richest embroidery of which he was master, and appeared before his mistress arrayed in all the brightness of peerage; a sight whose charms she had not the power to resist, and the consequences are only to be imagined. In short, the same scene which Jupiter acted with his above-mentioned mistress of old was more than beginning, when ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... previous injustice disposed my relatives to receive me better, perhaps, than might otherwise have been the case. I had little to ask in the way of fortune, and feeling no disposition to raise a question that might disturb the peerage of the Ducies, I became ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... any day for the last fifty years. England has become—if she has not always been—a center of infection to the whole of Europe. Every disastrous experiment on which we have embarked has come from her. By her gross mismanagement of established institutions—the Church, the Peerage, the Army, Land, Labor, Capital—the whole system of voluntary service and voluntary education—she has driven the rest of Europe into revolutionary changes for which there was no necessity whatever. In avoiding the woeful example she has set us, of always standing still on the wrong ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... Election of 1874 occurred during my second year at Oxford. The City of Oxford was contested by Harcourt, Cardwell, and the local brewer. Harcourt and Cardwell were returned; but immediately afterwards Cardwell was raised to the peerage, and a bye-election ensued. I can vividly recall the gratification which I felt when the Liberal candidate—J. D. Lewis—warmly pressed my hand, and, looking at my rosette, hoped that he might count on my vote and interest. Not for the world would I have revealed the damning fact ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... our thoughts to days comparatively modern, for when Admiral Collingwood was raised to the peerage of Great Britain, it was by the title of "Baron Collingwood of Caldburn and Hethpoole, in the county of Northumberland." The brave Admiral was fond of planting an oak tree whenever he found an opportunity, to secure the continuance ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... the great world, and she was certainly posing as my informant. She affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on the governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. "Give 'um all a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year," she maintained. "That's ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... aristocracy. They ruled, and had among their number men who were gentlemen of the grand style, capable of virile passions and striking deeds, incapable, constitutionally and by training, of the prudent foresight of careful tradesmen. Lord Thormanby, who rejoiced in a brand new Union peerage and was a wealthy man, kept race horses. Sir Francis, who, except for the Union peerage, was as big a man as Lord Thormanby, kept race horses too. Lord Thormanby bought a family coach of remarkable proportions. Sir ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... of chagrin and wonder at the various incidents which had converted his mansion, first into an hospital for a wounded duellist, and now into the sick chamber of a dying nobleman. "And yet," said he, "I have always kept aloof from the soldiery and the peerage. My coenobitium has only next to be made a lying-in hospital, and then, I trow, the ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... native country, along with the Solway prisoners, in order to strengthen the English party in Scotland."—(Sadler's Papers, vol. i. p. 66, note.) His name appears on the 1st of April 1549, as an Extraordinary Lord of Session, which disproves the account in Douglas's Peerage of his having been killed at Pinkie, in September 1547. Having predeceased his brother, his eldest son, in 1556, became eighth Earl ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... Cavalier gentlemen who filled the Lower House. In their minds a standing army was inseparably associated with the Rump, with the Protector, with the spoliation of the Church, with the purgation of the Universities, with the abolition of the peerage, with the murder of the King, with the sullen reign of the Saints, with cant and asceticism, with fines and sequestrations, with the insults which Major Generals, sprung from the dregs of the people, had offered to the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... much more than any commoner would have done. Now, on the other hand, a kinsman of Lord Carlisle, viz., Lord Byron, because he brought real genius and power to the effort, found a vast auxiliary advantage in a peerage and a very ancient descent. On these double wings he soared into a region of public interest, far higher than ever he would have reached by poetic power alone. Not only all his rubbish—which in quantity is great—passed ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... with the connivance of the guest after two mouthfuls; the stage cigarette, which nobody ever seems to want to smoke to the end—thinking of these as they make their appearances in the houses of the titled, one would say that the hospitality of the peerage was not a thing to make ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... Ida's grandfather—a peerage; the Herons had often been offered a baronetcy; but they'd always refused, and the squire declined the peerage. He said that no man could wish to be higher than Heron, of Herondale; that better men than he had been contented with it, and he was quite satisfied with the rank which had satisfied ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... Broadstone was an urgent appeal to Ferrier's patriotism and to his personal friendship for the writer; begging him for the sake of party unity, and for the sake of the country, to allow the Prime Minister to cancel the agreement of the day before; to accept a peerage and the War Office in lieu of the Exchequer and the leadership of the House. The Premier gave a full account of the insurmountable difficulties in the way of the completion of the Government, which had disclosed themselves during the course of the afternoon and evening following his interview ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has, though unknown and supposed to be an intruder, carried her off from an English adorer—a sort of Lovelace-Byron, whose name is Lord Gousberycharipay (an advance on Paul de Kock and even Parny in the nomenclature of the English peerage), and who inserts h's ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... meritorious young person; and will even concede that the thought of her becoming my kinswoman rouses in me an inevitable distaste, no less attributable to the discord of her features than to the source of her eligibility to disfigure the peerage—that being her father's lucrative transactions in Pork, which I find indigestible in ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... were more apparent than real. The special powers of the House of Lords were becoming shadowy, and almost the only real significance of the peerage was when it was united with the House of Commons and made a part of the larger whole of Parliament. [Footnote: 36 and 37 Henry VIII., f. 60 (Dyer, Reports, ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... Mr. Morley had been raised to the peerage and Lord Crewe had succeeded him at the India Office was anything done to meet the demand of the Western-educated classes for a larger share in the administrative work of the country or to redress the very reasonable grievances of Indians employed in the Government services who ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... administrators. Gradually, with prolonged peace, the hereditary element choked and swamped the nominated element. The abbots disappeared, the lords multiplied. The peer ceased to be the leader of a shire, and sank into a mere idle landowner. Wealth alone grew at last to be a title to the peerage. The House of Lords became a House of Landlords. And the English people submitted to the claim of irresponsible wealth or irresponsible acres to exercise a veto upon national legislation. The anomaly, utterly indefensible in itself, had grown up so slowly ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... possessed property of a certain annual value. But with regard to the nature of the Upper House, it was much more difficult to come to a decision. Wentworth proposed that the Queen should establish a colonial peerage to form a small House of Lords, holding their seats by hereditary right; but this idea raised so great an outcry that he made haste to abandon it. Several of the committee were in favour of the scheme, afterwards adopted in Victoria, of making ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... notepaper, cards, or any new style of place cards. Several stationers maintain special departments where crests are looked up and authenticated and such families as are found in Fairbairn's Crests, Burke's Peerage, Almanche de Gotha, the Armoire General, are utilized to help in the establishment of the armorial bearing of American families. Of course, the College of Heraldry is always available where the American family can trace ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... the quiet but quite measureless contempt which he felt for his malice and meanness. Mackworth was a bully of another stamp; he was rather a clever fellow, set himself up for an aristocrat on the strength of being second cousin to a baronet, studied "De Brett's Peerage," dressed as faultlessly as Tracy himself, and affected at all times a studious politeness of manner. He had been a good deal abroad, and as he constantly adopted the airs and the graces of a fashionable person, the boys had felicitously named him French ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... view of the Labyrinth at Woodstock, and several particulars respecting Fair Rosamond, many doubts are stated relative to her death, viz. how and what time. I therefore send you the following account from Collins's Peerage of England:— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... gained considerable sums, not only by jobbing in the stocks, but in dealing in porcelain, spices, &c. It was debated for a length of time in the Parliament of Paris whether he had not, in his quality of spice-merchant, forfeited his rank in the peerage. It was decided in the negative. A caricature of him was made, dressed as a street porter, carrying a large bale of spices on his back, with the inscription, "Admirez La Force."], de Chaulnes, and d'Antin; the Marechal d'Estrees, the Princes de Rohan, de Poix, and de Leon. The Duke de Bourbon, son ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... always add a mysterious word or two in the hearing of my nursemaid or any friend of hers who looked into my room to see me. After my father had got me forward with instructions on the piano, and exercises in early English history and the book of the Peerage, I became the wonder of the house. I was put up on a stool to play 'In my Cottage near a Wood,' or 'Cherry Ripe,' and then, to show the range of my accomplishments, I was asked, 'And who married the Dowager Duchess of Dewlap?' and I answered, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that is merely a figure of speech," he said. "How could I abandon you? But it is quite true what that woman says, and I entirely agree with her and not with you in this respect, that the heir to a peerage ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... Wooster was one of the right things to do once or twice in the course of a season; and Wooster's steam yacht was a pleasant place of rest and haven of safety for any juvenile member of the peerage who had been plunging heavily, and went in fear ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... bank-holiday I have counted the list and find it contains no fewer than fifty-two high distinctions, one for every week of the year. These were won not by striking genius or brilliant talent. Sir JOHN LUBBOCK, to preserve a name which the crowning honour of the peerage did not displace in the public mind, was by nature and daily habit constitutionally industrious. After Eton he joined his father's banking business. In his diary under date Christmas Day, 1852, being the nineteenth year of his age, he gives an account of how he spends his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various
... a contemptible creature, weak and cruel. He had been dismissed from the army in 1759 for cowardice at the battle of Minden, and he was so generally despised that when in 1782 the king was obliged to turn him out of office and tried to console him by raising him to the peerage as Viscount Sackville, the House of Lords protested against the admission of such a creature. George III. had made this man his colonial secretary in the autumn of 1775, and he had much to do with planning the campaigns of the next two years. But now his influence in ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... me. Perhaps I ought not to have tried it; but I think you should blame those who lured me into extravagance and then deserted me. I've had a terrible, terrible experience! Do you know that? And I was within an ace of becoming an ornament of the British peerage. Did you know that?" ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... is our record of nobility. It is the same as the 'Blue Book' or the 'Peerage' of England. Either fortunately or unfortunately—I cannot say—you have no need of such ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... of the House, the Speaker decided that the Honorable Secretary for Foreign Affairs was entitled to the floor. Lord John Russell deserves a more extended historical and personal notice than the legitimate limits of this article will allow. But, as his recent elevation to the peerage has led the English press to give a review of his political antecedents, and as these articles have been copied quite generally into our own leading newspapers, it may be fairly presumed that most of my readers are familiar with the prominent incidents in his long and honorable public ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... should be sought. The legal attainments of the Irish Chancellor, the Earl of Clare, and the parliamentary and commercial connections of the Speaker, Foster, entitle their opinions to great weight. Foster may perhaps be won over by the offer of an English peerage. The Irish Bar, as also Lords Shannon and Ely, will probably oppose a Union. Some persons will object to the admission of Catholics even to the United Parliament, though that measure cannot do harm. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... which music is appreciated in England by all classes, Mr. Grossmith goes on to say: "We have made rapid strides, so have our servants. They don't know how to dust the piano, but they can play it. Everybody plays the piano, from the Peerage to the School Board. Then look how music has crept into our homes and social circles. Besides the piano, the mother and daughters play the banjo, the son plays the first fiddle, and the father the second fiddle—as usual. I ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... hands! You would be thought such a clever fellow!—Do not go to Monsieur de Granville's room; wait for him in his Court with that formidable great gun. It is a loaded cannon turned on the three most important families of the Court and Peerage. Be bold: propose to Monsieur de Granville that he should relieve you of Jacques Collin by transferring him to La Force, where the convicts know how to deal with those who ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... already found the effect of this different proceeding in both kingdoms? Have not two English prelates quitted their peerage and seats in Parliament, in a nation of freedom, for the sake of a more ample revenue, even in this unhappy kingdom, rather than lie under the mortification of living below their dignity at home? For which, however, they cannot be justly censured. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... a public marriage. But Mr. Beaufort, though generous, was not free from the worldliness which had met him everywhere, amidst the society in which his youth had been spent. His uncle, the head of one of those families which yearly vanish from the commonalty into the peerage, but which once formed a distinguished peculiarity in the aristocracy of England—families of ancient birth, immense possessions, at once noble and untitled—held his estates by no other tenure than his own caprice. Though ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... followed by an impeachment before the house of lords, where Melville was acquitted in the following year. Meanwhile, he had resigned office on April 9, the day after the vote of censure, and his place at the admiralty was taken by Sir Charles Middleton, who was raised to the peerage as Lord Barham. The appointment gave umbrage to Sidmouth, to whom Pitt had made promises of promotion for his own followers, and he was with difficulty induced to remain in the cabinet. Pitt was, however, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... mould that, if set off more to advantage, would have been recognised as elegant. But John Lindsay—for so he was called—bore always the stamp of misery on his striking features. There lay between the poor little man and the Crawford peerage only a narrow chasm, represented by a missing marriage certificate; but he was never able to bridge the gulf across; and he had to toil on in unhappiness, in consequence, as a mason's labourer. I have heard ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... is a younger son of a fifth earl in the British peerage. He is therefore by blood fit to meet in the field of honour the grandson of a—Nobody. Then, sir, as to the undefined charges against his character, they are gratuitous falsehoods. If, with these facts before you, a refusal ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... rapidly by their own crimes; and very few of our nobility can trace their names back to the authentic Battle Abbey roll. The great majority of the peers have sprung from, and all have intermarried with, the Commons; and the peerage has been from the first, and has become more and more as centuries have rolled on, the prize of success ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... Germaine; son of the seventh Earl and first Duke of Dorset. A Member of Parliament and a soldier, he became in 1775 Secretary of State for the Colonies in Lord North's Administration until the fall of his chief. His rise to the peerage in 1782 as Viscount Sackville gave cause to some acrimonious debates, which are referred to later, see Chapter 5. The Letters of Junius have often been ascribed ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... picked out for you long before you ever met her—so I started to get there first and with the heaviest guns, I borrowed your yacht for the duke and had him sail her round himself, so he'd have her here to give the dinner party on. Then I got a Burke's peerage and told MacGregor who he was and had him study up on his family history and get acquainted with his sister, Lady Mary, and his younger brother, the Honorable Cecil Something-or-other—in particular he was not to forget to rave about the ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... Hanoverian family, which for some unexplained reason he had contented himself with bearing with fortitude and patience. But it was in his official capacity that the consul's experience had been the most trying. At times it had seemed to him that much of the real property and peerage of Great Britain was the inherited right of penniless American republicans who had hitherto refrained from presenting their legal claims, and that the habitual first duty of generations of British noblemen on coming into their estates and titles was to ship their heirs and ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... saw in my life (and I never saw but her) you can, if you choose, marry Mademoiselle de La Bastie. Goodness! the mere inventory of your present advantages, not to speak of the future (a noble title, peerage, embassy!), is enough to make me drunk already,—like the men who ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... and what resounds In Fable or Romance of Uthers Son 580 Begirt with British and Armoric Knights; And all who since, Baptiz'd or Infidel Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore When Charlemain with all his Peerage fell By Fontarabbia. Thus far these beyond Compare of mortal prowess, yet observ'd Thir dread Commander: he above the rest In shape and gesture proudly eminent 590 Stood like a Towr; his form had yet not lost All her Original ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... knightly possessors of Wychecombe, centuries before King James established the rank of baronet. When our great-grandfather, Sir Wycherly, accepted the patent of 1611, he scarcely did himself honour; for, by aspiring higher, he might have got a peerage. However, a baronet he became, and for the first time since Wychecombe was Wychecombe, the estate was entailed, to do credit to the new rank. Now, the first Sir Wycherly had three sons, and no daughter. Each of these sons ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... an artful move, my MARY, but, it stroikes me, a bit thin, And it won't come home consolin', to "the poor ov Adam's kin." Faix! they won't stop 'cabin passengers,' big-wigs, an' British Peerage, But—they don't want the poor devils that crowd over in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, February 4, 1893 • Various
... destined to last long. Sir Robert was forced to give up the contest and be shelved with a peerage. In 1742, he was created Earl of Orford, and resigned. The wonder is that, with a mortal internal disease to contend with, he should have faced his foes so long. Verses ascribed to Lord Hervey ended, as did all the squibs of the day, with a ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... does his work rather than that in which he struggles to years of maturity. Moore and Byron were poets of the nineteenth century, although the one had attained to manhood and the other had grown from poverty to inherit a peerage before ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... have been conducted, and knows how much she owes to Sir Henry Hardinge's exertions. The Queen hopes that he will see an acknowledgment of this in the communication she has ordered to be made to him relative to his elevation to the Peerage. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... many seasons, that covered all traces of them since. But nothing is more probable than that the continual recurrence to the family genealogy, which had been necessitated by the matter of the dormant peerage, had caused the Eldredges, from father to son, to keep alive an interest in that ancestor who had disappeared, and who had been supposed to carry some of the most important family papers with him. But yet it gave ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... familiar name announced, 'Lord Colquhoun,' a distinguished judge who had lately been raised to the peerage, and whom we often met at dinners; then 'Miss Rowena Colquhoun'; and then in the midst, we fancied, of an unusual stir at the entrance door—'Miss Francesca Van Buren Monroe.' I involuntarily touched the Reverend Ronald's ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cooks, Scotch pedlars, and Italian whores, Were all made lords or lords' progenitors. Beggars and bastards by this new creation Much multiplied the peerage of the nation; Who will be all, ere one short age runs o'er, As true-born lords ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... way, on an absurd compromise between the real and the ideal. A conjuror is to come that very night. When explanations have gone so far, the Duke at last makes his entry. The stage directions tell us that "in the present state of the peerage it is necessary to explain that the Duke, though an ass, is a gentleman." His thoughts are the most casual on earth. He is always being reminded of something or somebody which has nothing to do with the case. As for instance, "I saw the place you're putting up . . . Mr. Smith. Very good ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... annuity office; and her nephew was sent out with Lord Albemarle to Spain. A more remarkable relative was Clayton, Bishop of Clogher, who evidently knew the value of her patronage, for a more importunate suitor, and a more persevering sycophant, never kissed hands. Finally, she obtained a peerage for her husband, a distinction in which, of course, she herself shared, but which probably she desired merely to throw some eclat round a singularly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... means, and it's being put on to things in the City, and having all your bills paid if you introduce them to people; only you sometimes have to write their letters for them to prevent them putting the whole grand address, &c., that is in the Peerage; and she says it is quite a profession now, and done by the best people, which of course must be true, as Carry is Tom's ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... of nineteen—three years ago. She got him to promise to marry her; and the parents came down, and paid her enormously to let him go. Now she's got through all that money, and she boasts she's going to marry young Dunstable before his parents know anything about it. She's going to make sure of a peerage this time. Oh, she's odious! She's greedy, she's vulgar, she's false! And of course"—the girl's eyes grew wide and scared—"there may be other things much worse. How ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... the Bachelor of Arts, "at the home of my friends, the aristocracy in Scotland. The name of the house, and the precise rank in the peerage of my illustrious host, it is not necessary for me to give. All, however, who know those more than feudal and baronial halls, are aware that the front of the castle looks forth on a somewhat narrow ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... fearing his influence in that body, wished his transfer to the Chamber of Peers, where, in their judgment, he would be less dangerous. At the last Council of Ministers attended by M. de Villele, the King passed to him a note in pencil, announcing that he had called him to the peerage. The statesman declined, in a note also in pencil. "You wish then to impose yourself upon me as minister?" wrote the King once more. M. de Villele appeared moved, and passed to the sovereign this response: "The King well knows the contrary; but since he can write it, ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... The members of the peerage and baronetage of Great Britain, the members of the untitled aristocracy—the staff officers of the army and navy—the members of the different clubs—are each of them sufficiently numerous to effect this ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Charles Gordon Lennox, Fourth Duke of Richmond, Earl of March and Baron Settrington in the peerage of England; Duke of Lennox, Earl of Darnley and Baron Methuen in the peerage of Scotland; Duc d'Aubigny in France, Governor-General of Canada, lord of Halnaker, Goodwood and West Hampnett. There was, as has been above hinted, a bar sinister in his escutcheon, for he was ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... a finished picture of fashionable life? Let a gentlemanly man, with a gentlemanly style, take of foolscap paper a few quires; stuff them well with high-sounding titles—dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, ad libitum. Then open the peerage at random, pick a supposititious author out of one page of it, and fix the imaginary characters upon some of the rest; mix it all up with quantum suff. of puff, and the book is in a second edition before ninety-nine ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... the honor he received, though certainly adequate for a victory over a force somewhat inferior, was not adequate when measured by that given to Anson, the First Lord of the Admiralty, for a much less notable achievement six months before. Anson was raised to the peerage; Hawke was only given the Order of the Bath, the ribbon which Nelson coveted, because a public token, visible to all, that the wearer had done distinguished service. It was at that period a much greater distinction than it afterwards became, through the great extension in numbers and the ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... name from the Red Book, another from the Peerage, and another from the Clerical Directory, so that one gets—er—a more natural and lifelike combination in that way; and yet avoids a real name. I think Thomas came from the Clerical directory—or was it the Peerage? Well, no matter, that's ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... attend Mr Masterton, who stated that he had made every inquiry relative to the De Benyons; as he had said, they were an Irish family of the highest rank, and holding the peerage of De Beauvoir, but that he had written to his agent in Dublin, giving him directions to obtain for him every possible information in his power relative to all the individuals composing it. Till this had been received, all that I could do was to remain quiet. I then narrated ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... incomprehensible in his character and actions. Let it be said, therefore, at once, that he was the second, and at one time favourite, son of the Earl of Swimbridge, whom the whole world knows to be beyond all question the proudest member of the British peerage. Amiable, generous, high-spirited, and with every trait of the best type of the British gentleman fully developed in him, this son had joined the British navy at an early age, as a midshipman, and had made rapid progress in the profession of his choice—to ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... having had his pretensions rejected by a decision of the peers of the kingdom, he had hoped for more success under Philip of Valois, whose sister he had married. Philip tried to satisfy him with another domain raised to a peerage; but Robert, more and more discontented, got involved in a series of intrigues, plots, falsehoods, forgeries, and even, according to public report, imprisonments and crimes, which, in 1332, led to his being ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... have you on my hands. We know all the particulars of Scully's history. He was a Tory attorney at Oldborough; he was jilted by the present Lady Gorgon, turned Radical, and fought Sir George in his own borough. Sir George would have had the peerage he is dying for, had he not lost that second seat (by-the-by, my Lady will be here in five minutes), and Scully is now quite firm there. Well, my dear lad, we have bought your incorruptible Scully. Look here,"—and Mr. Crampton produced ...
— The Bedford-Row Conspiracy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... seem to have been particularly affected by this order of the peerage; for, somewhat later, we have one, "On Unnatural Flights in Poetry," by the Earl of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... all others who advise contend: He bids distraction o'er his country blaze, Then, swelter'd with revenge, retreats to Hayes: Swallows the pension; but, aware of blame, 280 Transfers the proffer'd peerage to his dame. The felon thus of old, his name to save, His pilfer'd mutton to a brother gave. But should some frantic wretch whom all men know To nature and humanity a foe, Deaf to the widow's moan and orphan's ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... who attain by talents, interest, and good fortune, or all, or any of these, a lofty social position, have no more to do with the exclusive or merely fashionable sets than you or I. A man may be a barrister in full practice to-day, an attorney-general to-morrow, a chief-justice the day after with a peerage: yet his wife and daughter visit the same people, and are visited by the same people, that associated with them before. If men of fashion know them, it is because they have business to transact or favours to seek for, or because it is part of their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... accompany the two ladies. Many were eager for the privilege, and the occasion was a fitting one for the display of feminine coquetry. Miss Graham did not neglect the opportunity; and after a little animated conversation between the lady and a young fop who was heir to a peerage, the lordling took his place opposite the ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... to the earldom of Stirling, a Scotch peerage; and, as he believed that he was a direct descendant of the last Lord Stirling, the young man went to England, and laid claim to the estate and title. He was successful in proving his direct descent from ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... her. She has such playful, girlish manners, and an irritating way of giving vent to the most utter platitudes with the air of having just discovered a new truth. She has been with us this morning and mentioned that her father was four times removed from a peerage. I stifled a childish desire to ask who had removed him, while Mrs. Wilmot murmured, "How interesting!" As she minced away Mrs. Crawley said meditatively, "The Rocking Horse Fly," and with a squeal of delight I realized ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... sovereigns, and must renounce all hereditary titles and orders of nobility. In this way one speaker said he hoped to shut out those refugees from the twenty thousand French nobility, who might choose to fly to the United States. Another expected to see an equally large number of the peerage arrive from Britain, as soon as the correct principles of ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... seized by the police in Trafalgar Square without a word of accusation or explanation. The Home Secretary says that in his opinion the police are very nice people, and there is an end of the matter. A Member of Parliament attempts to criticise a peerage. The Speaker says he must not criticise a peerage, ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... another significance, which you will find if you look into your dictionary,—that blessed Magna Charta of linguistic rights and privileges. I do not claim the prerogatives of Ruskin's class of the 'well educated, who are learned in the peerage of words; know the words of true descent and ancient blood at a glance, from words of modern canaille;' but I venture the assertion that I am sufficiently sophisticated to plunge into the vortex of public life, and yet keep my ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... effort is represented by "The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties," published in the same year as "The New Zealanders." With a colleague he edited "The Pictorial History of England," in four volumes. Amongst his other works are "A Romance of the Peerage," "Spencer and his Poetry," "A History of Commerce," "The English of Shakespeare," and "Bacon, his Writings and Philosophy." He had a flowing and cultured style, and he embellished his work with many references to the classics. He was one of the best read ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... every prominent man of the peerage in the Parliament declared himself in favor of resistance. . . . I have seen at the dinners we then attended almost every idea put forward, which, soon afterwards, produced such startling effects."[4247] Already in 1774, M. de Vaublanc, on his way to Metz, finds ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... wealth, who had recently been raised to the peerage, was staying at one of our country houses. His daughter, my uncle, and an Italian Abbe were the only guests besides. The merchant was a portly, purple-faced man, who bore his new honours with a curious mixture of assumed pomposity and natural good-humour. The Abbe was dwarfish ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... of dahlias is a curious sign of the times. It rivals in oddity that of the Racing Calendar. Next to the peerage, Shakspeare and Homer seem to be the chief sources whence they have derived their appellations. Thus we have Hectors and Dioedes of all colours, a very black Othello, and a very fair Desdemona. One beautiful blossom, which seems like a white ground thickly rouged ...
— The Lost Dahlia • Mary Russell Mitford
... far, At last he found an ancient tar Who served with RODNEY and his crew Against the French in 'Eighty-two, (That gained the peerage). He gave him fifty pounds a year, His rum, his baccy, and his beer; And had a comfortable den Rigged up in what, by ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... and Art' are all spoken of in the lump, and rather contemptuously (like 'reading, writing, and arithmetic'), and have no settled position whatever. In a book of precedence, however—a charming class of work, and much more full of humour than the peerage—I recently found indicated for the first time the relative place of Literature in the social scale. After a long list of Eminent Personages and Notables, the mere perusal of which was calculated to bring the flush of pride into my British cheek, I found at the ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... lost sight of Dauntless in surveying the field of desirable husbands for Eleanor. She could see nothing but Englishmen, behind whom lurked the historic London drawing-rooms and British estates. That is how and why young Windomshire, a most delightful Londoner, with prospects and a peerage behind him, came to be a guest in her city house, following close upon a long sojourn in the Bermudas. HE had been chosen; the battle was over, so far as Eleanor's hand was concerned. What matter if ...
— The Flyers • George Barr McCutcheon
... Howard married the daughter of Thomas Mowbray Duke of Norfolk. Sir Richard Pole married the Countess of Salisbury, daughter of George, Duke of Clarence. Good blood was indeed held in high respect: but between good blood and the privileges of peerage there was, most fortunately for our country, no necessary connection. Pedigrees as long, and scutcheons as old, were to be found out of the House of Lords as in it. There were new men who bore the highest titles. There were untitled men well known to be descended from knights who had broken ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... well defined as elegantly skittish; She loves a Lord as only a Republican can do; And quite the best of titles she's persuaded are the British, And well she knows the Peerage, for she reads ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... that, having from the first determined, if possible, to obtain a good degree, I made a resolute stand against the advances of Lawless (who, in consequence of his father's having, for some reason best known to himself and the Premier, received a peerage, had now become an "honourable") and the "rowing set," amongst whom, by a sort of freemasonry of kindred souls, he had become enrolled immediately on his arrival. After several fruitless attempts to shake my determination, they pronounced me an incorrigible "sap," and, leaving ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... villages of New England, the differences in what we should call social position, though noticeable, were not extreme. While in England some had been esquires or country magistrates, or "lords of the manor,"—a phrase which does not mean a member of the peerage, but a landed proprietor with dependent tenants[1]; some had been yeomen, or persons holding farms by some free kind of tenure; some had been artisans or tradesmen in cities. All had for many generations been more or less accustomed to self-government and to public meetings for discussing ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... Superstition marked every stage of the measure as happening upon some date adverse to the Stuarts. On the fourth of November the first Article of the Union was approved; on a fourth of November was William of Orange born. On the eighth of January the Peerage was renounced; on an eighth of January was the warrant for the Murder at Glencoe signed. The ratification of the Article of Union was on the sixteenth of January. On a sixteenth of January was the sentence of Charles the First pronounced. The dissolution of the Scottish Parliament took place upon ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... rank of his profession, that office seemed to fall to him by right of universal acknowledgment; and on a vacancy in the Common Pleas, he was promoted to the chief-justiceship in 1799, and at the same time raised to the peerage by the title of Baron Eldon. It is an instance of the dutiful and affectionate nature, which long connexion with the world and the pride of success—the two strongest temptations to heartlessness—could not extinguish, that he made a point of writing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... in ten years he would be a middle-aged man; and, alas! for he felt in him manifold resources, sufficient were he to live for five hundred years. Must he marry Agnes? He might if she was a peeress in her own right! Or should he win a peerage for himself by some great poem, or by some great political treachery? No, no; he wanted nothing better than to live always strong and joyous in this corner of fair England; and to be always loved by girls, and to be always talked of by them about their tea-tables. ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... hundreds of books, Acts of Parliament, thousands of pamphlets, tracts, broadsheets, ballads, and other flying fragments of literature; and he never seems to have forgotten anything he ever read. In. 1849 he was elected Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow; and in 1857 was raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Macaulay of Rothley— the first literary man who was ever called to the House of Lords. He died at Holly Lodge, Kensington, in ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... far from my purpose to depreciate M. Victor Cousin. The titles of this celebrated philosopher even lay me under an obligation to praise him. He belongs to that living pantheon of France which we call the peerage, and his intelligent legs rest on the velvet benches of the Luxembourg. I must indeed sternly repress all private feelings which might seduce me into an excessive enthusiasm. Otherwise I might be suspected of servility; for M. Cousin is very influential ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... portrait painted by Reynolds was considered a proper "entree" into the "bon ton." To attempt to give the names of royalty who sat to him would be to present a transcript of Burke's Peerage. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... amongst the hospital lists; suffering and disaster, which drew their humble contributions from the struggling poor and middle classes, left him unmoved and his check book unopened. In an age when huge gifts on behalf of charity was the fashionable road to the peerage, his attitude was all the more noticeable. He would give a thousand pounds for a piece of Sevres china which took his fancy; he would not give a thousand farthings to ease the sufferings of his fellows. Yet there were few ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... conformation of body, his bear-like manners, his oddities, and his early struggles. You devour the life of Gifford, not because he was a poet, but because he was a shoemaker; and that of Byron, more on account of his vices, his peerage, and his domestic unhappiness, than for the sake of his poetry. And in Waller, too, you feel some supplemental interest, because he united what are usually thought the incompatible characters of a poet and a political plotter, and very nearly reached the altitudes ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... consequent on Lord HARTINGTON's succession to the Peerage have very much narrowed the freedom previously enjoyed by the Member for West Birmingham, and, in a corresponding degree, enlarged the sphere of his responsibilities.... The Statesman who has to act as guide and moderator at St. Stephen's will be careful, no doubt, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... American custom of including in them the more eminent contemporary living characters. That would add greatly to the use of the book; and the matter could easily be collected from the current Books of Peerage and Parliamentary Companions, with aid from the numerous magazines as to distinguished ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 44, Saturday, August 31, 1850 • Various
... a peerage was bestowed upon him, and all the world applauded the honour conferred on Art in his name. On January 13th, 1896, the news of his death came as a terrible surprise. The new peer, Baron Leighton of Stretton, was buried with much state ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... multitude of avenging arms ready to be raised, filled his ambitious spirit with involuntary apprehension. Looking around him, he was alarmed to find himself solitary, and conceived the idea of strengthening his power by moderating it. Then it was that he thought of creating an hereditary peerage, and reconstructing his monarchy on more secure foundations. But Napoleon saw without illusion to the bottom of things. The nation, wholly and continually occupied in prosecuting the designs of its chief, had previously not had time to form ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... Trinity College, Cambridge, and studied law. He disliked his profession, greatly preferring literature. In 1830 he entered Parliament and was made Secretary of War in 1839. He was elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University and was raised to the peerage in 1857. He died in 1859. His best-known poems are "Ivry" and "The Lays of ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... glory of raising our name; and now you are progressing so well, only be prudent, or you will fail after all. Soon, however, you must ask for some high post, and obtain for me a lord-lieutenancy not too far from Paris. Then you can have a peerage, and become a duke and lieutenant-general. In two years, if ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... in so many wills.) is dreadfully opposed to selection; suppose the first-born bull was necessarily made by each farmer the begetter of his stock! On the other hand, as you say, ablest men are continually raised to the peerage, and get crossed with the older Lord-breeds, and the Lords continually select the most beautiful and charming women out of the lower ranks; so that a good deal of indirect selection improves the Lords. Certainly I agree with you the present ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... with all his peerage fell At Fontarabia Milton, P. L. b. i. 586. See Warton's Hist. of Eng. Poetrg, v. i. sect. iii. p. 132. "This is the horn which Orlando won from the giant Jatmund, and which as Turpin and the Islandic bards report, was endued with magical power, and might be heard at the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... as I learn from an indiscretion of my Peerage, in 1870, and is, therefore, as near to thirty (the dangerous age!) as to the six-and-twenty your droll old Marietta gives her. Her Christian names are Beatrice Antonia Teresa Mary—faites en votre choix. She was married at nineteen to Baldassarre Agosto, Principe Udeschini, Duca ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland |
