would turn up his nose with contempt. Is it surprising that tnis excellent and most conscientious man, the most influential dignitary of his order next to the President, should have left behind him a family wholly unprovided for save by the miserable dole of £75 a-year vouchsafed to his widow from the enormous funds at the disposal of his former colleagues? The post is now somewhat more liberally remunerated, or it would not have been as efficiently filled as it is.

The President of the Royal Academy, the claims upon whose time are often of the most absorbing character, receives, as we have already stated, nothing whatever from the academical funds. He has, like Mungo in the play, to be "here and there and everywhere;" now presiding at charitable meetings or dinners for smoothing the decline of life of the decayed artist; anon sent for by the minister to be questioned and perhaps bullied upon topics upon which the most minute accuracy is demanded, and for which he must prepare himself accordingly; at a sacrifice of time and labour which compel a large deduction from his professional earnings. He has nothing but the barren honour comprised in the initials P.R.A. for his reward. Lawrence, the most courtly of Presidents, was ruined, less by the legitimate duties of his office, than by the demands upon his time and talents it incidentally involved. His minutes were to him, in the zenith of his fame, worth almost as many guineas; yet was he compelled to devote hour after hour and day after day to labours which did not yield him a single farthing of compensation; and if a Hume or an Ewart attempted to create for themselves political capital by echoing the outcry of the press or of some prolétaire M.P. against the Academy, upon him devolved the duty of replying to their misrepresentations. If the lie were deemed worthy of correction, it was to him that the preparation of the reply was referred. The qualities demanded in the President of such an institution are of so multifarious and onerous a character, that, if of any standing in his art, a gratuity of £1,000 a-year would barely compensate him for the sacrifices it entails upon him. Shee accepted the office with some reluctance, and could so little have afforded the inroads made upon his professional engagements, that, but for the anticipation in his behalf of the £300 per annum bequeathed, under certain contingencies, by Sir Francis Chantry for the use of future Presidents, he would scarcely have been able to keep his house in Cavendish-square over his head, for he derived no benefit from the Academy beyond the barren initials of P.R.A. after his name in the Catalogue.

The Professors of History and Anatomy have no stipend whatever, and are therefore perfectly justified in limiting their labours to their annual attendance at the Academy Dinner; that grand field-day for dissatisfied officers and complimentary guests. A superannuated Royal Academician, when no longer able to pursue his profession, is allowed £100 per annum, and his wife, if she survive him, £75; there is no pension whatever for his children, so that the only daughter of a member who may be unprovided for is left to perish, so far as the regulations of the Royal Academy are concerned.

Such is the institution which has been described as a "corrupt," "selfish," "despotic" oligarchy, injurious to art, destructive of the art genius of the country, and deservedly obnoxious to the censure, not only of the public at large, but of the members of both Houses of Parliament in particular; who are recommended to confiscate its funds and paralyse its means of further "mischief" by the most stringent and restrictive enact

ments.

Having rendered such testimony in behalf of this much-abused institution as justice appears to demand at our hands, and having shewn, we trust satisfactorily, that it is the converse of what it has been described by its enemies, we shall on some future occasion endeavour to discuss with candour and calmness those errors and short-comings of its constitution, so far as we have been enabled to discover them, which appear to us really liable to reasonable objection, and which, in these days of professed liberality would seem to have furnished so frequent a handle to its assailants. We allude to the pertinacity with which it has uniformly rejected advice, however friendly the quarter in which it has been offered, and the obstinacy with which it continues to adhere to many solecisms in the laws by which it is governed, which, whilst they help to provoke a powerful and damaging antagonism, are calculated to impede its usefulness, and weaken and impair the enormous power for good to which it has attained. We have shewn what the Royal Academy really has done for the Fine Arts of the English School, and we shall next endeavour to explain what it has not done and might have done, by an internal reform of errors and oversights which are more or less incident to all human institutions. It has, however, revised, at the command of the Queen, that ungracious and even ungrateful regulation which has pressed with so discouraging an effect upon an art to which its most eminent members owe by far the largest portion of their fame, in having amended the law which restricted the engraver to any but a subordinate rank in its scale of honours; but there are other of its rules which call quite as peremptorily for amendment, to which we propose hereafter, in no unfriendly spirit, to direct the attention of its Council.

THE NOBLE AND GENTLE MEN OF ENGLANDa.

Ir was a remark of Sir Egerton Brydges, a man of great talent and observation, if not in every case a perfectly honest genealogist, that there is no quality to which people in general are disposed to pay greater respect than that of ancient and honourable descent; at the same time that there is none that is more offensive to them, and none on which they are greater sceptics. In its being "offensive" we are not inclined to agree; indeed, the charge is somewhat inconsistent with the "respect" that is said to be entertained for it. But if the case be put in this way, that nothing is intermixed with more unsound pretension, with which the world has good reason to be offended, in that view we coincide. And where the world is conscious that so much pretension exists, and yet has not sufficient knowledge to distinguish the fictitious from the true, it may be excused for being sceptical.

The popularity of many recent books on genealogy proves that the attachment of the English to this study is not now less devoted than in the days of Sir Egerton Brydges. The frequent use made of the genealogical manuscripts in the British Museum attests the same fact. The goodly peerage, whether of Debrett, Lodge, or Burke, which is seen on

"The Noble and Gentle Men of England; or, Notes touching the Arms and Descents of the Ancient Knightly and Gentle Houses of England, arranged in their respective Counties. Attempted by Evelyn Philip Shirley, Esq., M.A., one of the Knights of the Shire for the County of Warwick." (Small 4to.)

every drawing-room table,—that "British bible," as it has been somewhat profanely termed,—is the great text-book of this branch of knowledge; and the successive publications of the Burkes ", on The Commoners of England" and "The Landed Gentry,"—both happy and attractive titles, under which so many are anxious to range themselves,-have provided the untitled nobility with a correspondent register of their own claims to social rank and distinction. There is something, however, after all, that is delusive and unsatisfactory in this crowd of gentility. It resembles the throng of carriages in Hyde Park, or the crush at the Queen's drawing-room. The lord of Norman descent is jostled by the parvenu of yesterday. The gold is undistinguished among the gilded, the silver among the plated and electrotyped. Not only are many families very new, but many professedly old are the mere personations and substitutes of those that they resemble. They have assumed the semblance, and taken the name and position, of the ancient fathers of the forest, but they are not the venerable trees in their vigour.

It consequently becomes a natural desire with those who really take an interest in these matters, to distinguish from out the modern thicket those time-honoured English oaks, around which cling so many associations that connect them with the history of our common country.

Mr. Shirley has "attempted" this task under conditions that some may consider exceedingly strict and limited. In the first place, every family admitted into his volume must have been established as landowners of knightly or gentle degree before the commencement of the sixteenth century, that is, more than 350 years ago. Secondly, they must still exist in the position of landowners. Thirdly, he limits himself to direct male descent, excluding those families now represented by female heirs, even though the former name has been assumed; and also excluding illegitimate descent, though it may occupy the same position as the legitimate male line would have enjoyed. The other conditions of Mr. Shirley's plan are, -when families have sold their ancient estates, to notice them in those counties where they are at present seated; but if they still possess the ancient estate, to notice them there, though they may now reside in another county.

The most remarkable result of this investigation is the very scanty number among our county families whose claims come up to the required conditions. A list of the Gentry of England, made in the reign of Henry the Sixth, is inserted, county by county, in Fuller's "Worthies ;" and on introducing the first portion, under Bedfordshire, that quaint and sententious author observed, “ Hungry time hath made a glutton's meal on this catalogue of Gentry, and hath left but a very little morsel for manners remaining." This was after a lapse of two centuries; and the effects of three centuries and a-half upon the families flourishing in 1500, are, as may be supposed, still more fatal. Of our chief historical families in ancient days not one, indeed, remains in its former vigour; for even the Berkeleys, the Talbots, the Stanleys, the Howards, and the Clintons belong, in that view, to the later centuries of our history; though, in point of baronial rank, the antiquity of the two former is very remote. The Veres, after rearing twenty occupants of the earldom of Oxford, became extinct at the commencement of the last century, and have not a place in Mr. Shirley's volume.

We may also add their book entitled, "Visitations of Gentlemen's Seats," and that on "The Royal Descents of the Nobility," which was suggested by the previous work of Mr. Charles Edward Long on the same subject.

Nor do we find there one of the house of Percy, which, after holding for three centuries the earldom of Northumberland, became extinct in the male line in the reign of Charles the Second. The other great families who during some centuries held the chief earldoms of England, as the FitzAlans, the Beauchamps, the Bohuns, the Bourchiers, the Despensers, the Mortimers, and the Warrens, have all disappeared. The Nevilles exist only in the junior branch of Abergavenny; the Ferrers in the junior house of Baddesley-Clinton, the Cliffords in those of Ugbrooke. The Courtenays, though now restored to their ancient earldom of Devon, are also a younger branch that has continued for three centuries in a lower degree. We scarcely know why we do not find in Mr. Shirley's pages the family of Hastings, earl of Huntingdon : is it that that race is now entirely denuded of landed estate? The Viscount Devereux also (the remaining branch of Devereux Earl of Essex) is not admitted, we believe because his estates are not in England, but in Wales.

If we turn from the ancient earls of England to the ancient barons, which of them shall we now find subsisting in the male line? We no longer have an Audley, a Badlesmere, a Bardolph, a Basset, a Bottetourt, a Burghersh, a Chaworth, a Cobham, a Cromwell, a Dacre, a Darcy, a Deincourt, a Furnival, a Greystock, a Hungerford, a Latimer, a Lovell, a Maltravers, a Poynings, a Roos, a Strange, a Zouche, or many others that formerly flourished for shorter periods of time and with less distinction. It is true that several of these names are perpetuated in the titles of our existing peerage; but none of them obtain a place in Mr. Shirley's book as surviving in the male line.

He still is able to describe a branch of the ancient house of the Viscounts Beaumont, and the old baronial houses of Lumley, Scrope, Stourton, and Willoughby, as well as those of Berkeley, Talbot, Clinton, and Stanley already alluded to.

"Pre-eminent among the Norman aristocracy is the house of Berkeley, and more especially remarkable from being the only family in England in the male line retaining as their residence their ancient feudal castle."

There exist also junior branches of some more recently ennobled houses, as Harley, Wyndham, Brooke formerly Lords Cobham, and Sutton Lord Lexington.

The present House of Peers contains about 375 hereditary members, of whom less than ninety, or not quite one-fourth, alone are entitled to commemoration in Mr. Shirley's catalogue. The roll of English baronets now numbers 677, and of them we find only eighty in the same position.

To specify more particularly the contents of Mr. Shirley's work, we may state that it describes altogether 327 families, some of whom, we believe, have become extinct even whilst it has been passing through the press d. Of the whole we find that eighty-five (including Egerton of Tatton, recently created,) are peers of England or Great Britain, that is, members of the House of Lords, and six peers of Ireland (only), and eighty-three are baronets either of England or Scotland (i. e. Ulster or Nova Scotia).

Mr. Shirley's arrangement is in counties, which he takes alphabetically, from Bedfordshire to Yorkshire; and under each county he has divided

The Stanleys, however, are really a younger branch of the ancient Barons Audley. (p. 113.)

Mr. Shirley notices the extinction of the Horny olds of Worcestershire in p. 284. Another is Champernoun.

the families into two classes, Knightly and Gentle. There are some counties in which the ancient families abound much more than in others; and this is not always in proportion to their size. As a general rule, it may be taken that the territorial families have endured longest at a distance from the metropolis. In Middlesex there is now not one that fulfils the conditions of admittance into Mr. Shirley's pages. In all Yorkshire there are only twenty-six; whilst in Shropshire there are twenty-eight, in Devonshire twenty-one, in Cheshire twenty, in Lancashire sixteen, in Staffordshire and Warwickshire each fifteen, in Derbyshire thirteen, in Cornwall twelve. In Kent there are only ten, in Surrey five, in Essex and in Buckinghamshire each four, in Berkshire three, in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire each two, in Rutland one, in Huntingdonshire none.

It is still by no means impossible that a few other families may be discovered who have escaped Mr. Shirley's researches, particularly in those counties of which we have no county histories; and we may conclude that the numbers of those whom he gives under Yorkshire and Shropshire are partially owing to the assistance he has derived from the large collections for the genealogy of those counties made by two of his assistants, the historian of South Yorkshire and Mr. Joseph Morris of Shrewsbury.

The proportion of ancient families in the several counties appears to have been for some centuries past such as we have described. We have already quoted what old Fuller says under Bedfordshire; and of the next county in alphabetical order it is observed by the same humorous writer, that "The lands of Berkshire are very skittish, and are apt to cast their owners;" and again,

"Of names which were in days of yore,
Few remain here of a great store."

Cheshire, on the other hand, has been termed of old "that seed-plot of gentry,' ""the mother and the nurse of the gentility of England." We will here enumerate, by way of example, Mr. Shirley's list for Cheshire. His fourteen KNIGHTLY families are,-Davenport, Grosvenor (now Marquess of Westminster), Egerton (of Oulton, baronet), Cholmondeley (now marquess), Tatton (recently created Lord Egerton of Tatton), Bunbury (baronet), Leycester, Massie, Wilbraham, Legh of East Hall in High Legh, Legh of West Hall in the same parish, Aldersey, Baskervyle (now called Glegg), and Brooke (of Norton, baronet). The six GENTLE families are,-Clutton, Leche, Barnston, Antrobus (baronet), Lawton, and Cotton (Viscount Combermere).

So, in Staffordshire, the eight KNIGHTLY,-Okeover, Bagot (now Lord Bagot), Gifford, Wrottesley (now Lord Wrottesley), Broughton (baronet), Mainwaring, Arden, and Meynell; and the seven GENTLE,-Wolseley (baronet), Cotes, Congreve, Sneyd, Whitgreave, Lane, and Parker. Of the latter, Wolseley is remarkable as "the most ancient among all the very ancient families in this county," having been resident at Wolseley even before the Norman Conquest; and it is remarkable that the Bagots, descending from Bagod of Domesday Book, have flourished on the adjoining estate from a period apparently as remote as the Wolseleys.

In Warwickshire the oldest family is the author's own, descended from Sasuuallo, another of the Domesday tenants, the account of which we will now extract, in order to shew Mr. Shirley's method,-though in this instance, as is natural, he has somewhat more to say than usual:

"Sasuualo, or Sewallis, whose name, says Dugdale, 'argues him to be of the old English stock,' mentioned in Domesday as mesne Lord of Eatington, under Henry de