the Montmorencys ended in Henri, Duc de Montmorency, Marshal of France, who was beheaded at Toulouse in 1632.1 But who then are the Montmorencys of whom we have since heard so often and so much? Who is the Duc de Montmorency mentioned in the Almanach de Gotha of this year? Who was Mathieu de Montmorency, the friend of Madame Recamier and Madame de Stäel ?

The pride of a French noble is to descend from one of the petty sovereigns, dukes, counts, or princes who once divided and distracted the kingdom. The Ducs de Gramont retained their legal rights in Bidache and Barnache till 1789. The illustration most coveted is a crusading ancestor; and in the Annuaire de la Noblesse' there is a fair sprinkling of names to which this distinction is attached.2 But the editor states that of the seventy-four crusaders who accompanied Godfrey de Bouillon in 1096, and whose shields may be seen at Versailles, only two, Montmorency and d'Aubusson, are now represented in the male line.

Of all the families now extant,' wrote Gibbon, 'the most ancient doubtless, and the most illustrious, is the house of France, which has occupied the same throne above one thousand years, and descends in a clear and lineal descent of males from the middle of the ninth century.' What an example of vicissitude it presents, and what alternations of fortune may be yet in store for it! The want of a peerage blending imperceptibly with the people, and carrying weight by inherited wealth and public services as well as by birth, was one

1 'The Rise of Great Families, Other Essays and Stories.' London, 1873. A book, like all by the same author, full of curious and interesting matter.

2 See Annuaire de la Noblesse de France;' publié par M. Borel d'Hauterive. 'Histoire Généalogique et Héraldique des Pairs de France,' &c. &c.; par M. le Chevalier de Courcelles. Paris, 1822-1833; 12 vols. quarto. Histoire Généalogique et Chronlogique,' &c. &c. ; par J. P. Anselme; third edition; 9 vols. folio. Paris, 1726. More than 600 volumes, relating to the French nobility, were destroyed in 1792.

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main cause of its fall, and will prove, we fear, the grand obstacle to its durable restoration for if our neighbours have been annually getting farther from liberty, they have certainly done their best to supply or find compensation in equality. In the meantime personal vanity finds its gratification in an assumption of names and titles, which makes confusion worse confounded whenever an attempt is made to test the accuracy of the Annuaire Nobiliaire,' or to compute how many historic families still survive out of the two hundred to which, according to Madame de Stäel, they were reduced before the revolutionary hurricane swept over them. In her Considerations on the French Revolution,' she says:

"The nation would willingly have submitted to the preeminence of the historic families, and I do not exaggerate in affirming that there are not more than two hundred in France. But the hundred thousand nobles and the hundred thousand priests who wished to enjoy privileges on a footing of equality with those of MM. de Montmorenci, de Gramont, de Crillon, &c., disgusted generally.'

The depreciated sort of nobility to which she alludes was acquired either by letters of nobility or by holding certain offices, like secrétaire du roi, which were constantly for sale. Twenty-five years of nobility qualified for the Chamber of Nobles.

The order of nobility was revived by Napoleon in 1808, but he appears to have limited his new creations to the titles of duke, count, and baron. We have discovered no marquises or viscounts amongst his new nobles. The hereditary quality of the peerage was destroyed in 1831, and titular nobility was again proscribed in 1848. It has revived with the Empire, and the existing law of France recognises and protects a property in names and arms. A section of the Annuaire' is devoted to the Jurisprudence Nobiliaire of the year; and amongst the reported cases for 1859

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are a suit by the Duc de Montbazon to prohibit the unauthorised assumption of the titles of the house of Rohan, and one by the Countess de Chateaurenard and her two sons to compel the suppression of the passages in a family history published by the Vicomte de Valori, in which he disputed their title to their name. The decision was, that the passages should be suppressed, and that the judgment of the court should be inserted in seven journals at the expense of the author.

Another numerous class of cases has arisen from a practice which may be illustrated by what happened to the Marquis de St. Cyr during the Reign of Terror. On his giving in his name and title to the Secretary of the Section, the following dialogue ensued:-Sec. 'Marquis de St. Cyr? Il n'y a plus de Marquis.' Marq. Bien-de St. Cyr.' Sec. Il n'y a plus de de.' Marq. 'St. Cyr, donc.' Sec. 'Il n'y a plus de Saints.' Marq. 'Allons-mettez Cyr tout court.' Sec. Citoyen, il n'y a plus de Cyrs (Sires); nous avons décapité le tyran.' Many who were not so unfortunate as to lose the whole of their names were compelled to drop a portion of them. Thus M. Prouveur de Pont, born in 1794, having been baptized without the de Pont from prudential motives, was formally authorised to resume it by a decree of the civil tribunal of Metz in 1859. It is only very recently that this branch of jurisprudence has been in active operation; and it remains to be seen whether it can be strictly applied in a country where it has been from time immemorial the custom to change names. 'Replace,' exclaims the editor of the Annuaire,'' the names of Voltaire, Beaumarchais, and d'Alembert, by those of Arouet, Caron, and Lerond, would you have done more than create a mischievous and melancholy confusion?' Sundry manors, or terres,' used to fetch a high price on account of the euphonic titles that passed with them.

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If the principal Roman nobles could establish their

pretended descent from the patricians of the Republic, they might boast the best genealogies in the world. But speaking of them as a class in the fourteenth century, Gibbon says :

In origin and affection they were aliens to their country; and a genuine Roman, could such have been produced, might have renounced these haughty strangers, who disdained the appellation of citizens, and proudly styled themselves the princes of Rome. After a dark series of revolutions, all records of pedigree were lost; the distinction of surnames was abolished; the blood of the nations was mingled in a thousand channels; and the Goths and Lombards, the Greeks and Franks, the Germans and Normans, had obtained the fairest possessions by royal bounty, or the prerogative of yalour.'

The chief authority for this statement is Muratori; and Petrarch, apostrophizing the Roman people in his celebrated letter to Rienzi, exclaims, 'Your masters are foreign adventurers. Examine well their origin. You will find that the valley of Spoleto, the Rhine, the Rhone, and some corner of the earth ignobler still, has bestowed them on you.' The Ursini, or Orsini, were said to have migrated from Spoleto in the twelfth century; and the Colonnas, whose first historical appearance was in 1104, admitted that they came from the banks of the Rhine, which their flatterers endeavoured to reconcile with an alleged Roman origin by the hypothesis that a cousin of Nero, who escaped from the city and founded Mayence, was their progenitor. In the Colonna Gallery at Rome is a picture of the Resurrection, in which the most distinguished members of the family, male and female, are represented rising from their coffins assisted by angels, and occupying the exclusive attention of the two first Persons of the Trinity.

The claim of the Massimi to descend from Fabius Maximus rests solely on the name; and the Anni

'In

baldi, we agree with Gibbon, 'must have been very ignorant, or very modest, if they had not descended from the Carthaginian hero.' So must the Giustiniani, if they had not descended from Justinian. With equal plausibility, the pedigree of the English de Veres began with Lucius Verus: there is a family in Prussian Poland, named Scipio, who are traditionally carried up to Scipio Africanus; and a Welsh family, named Williams, claim Anchises for an ancestor. the year of our Lord 390 (says Jacob) we find Caius Actius residing in the old Castle of Este, in the dukedom of Venice, in Italy; from whom, with the utmost historical certainty, we arrive at our present gracious Sovereign, without the least interruption in the succession.' He adds that Caius Actius was descended from a Roman patrician who was a contemporary of Tarquin. The Venetian nobles, all of whom were inscribed in the Golden Book, were of four classes, and of very unequal rank-the lowest being the descendants of those who had purchased their nobility. The highest-Gli Elettorali-were the descendants of the twelve persons by whom the first Doge was elected in 697 A.D., and of the four who, in conjunction with the representatives of these twelve, signed an instrument for the foundation of the Abbey of San Georgio Maggiore in 800. The twelve are sometimes spoken of as the Twelve Apostles, and the four as the Four Evangelists. The twelve were Badonari, Barozzi, Contarini, Dandoli, Falieri, Gradenighi, Memmi otherwise Monegari, Michielli, Morosini, Polani, Sanudi otherwise Candiani, Thiepoli. The four were Bembi, Bragadini, Cornari, Giustiniani. Six other families have been admitted without cavil to the first class: Delfini, Querini, Sagredi, Soranzi, Zeni, Zeniani.1

1 Sketches of Venetian History.' Murray's Family Library, ch. v. Disputes about precedence, which might disunite the privileged order, were discountenanced by the State. One of the Da Ponti family, in a