"Peerage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... happily constituted as to be able to take an interest in everything around him, and, even when more than seventy years old, to make new friends to replace those who had dropped off, he passed a long, a happy, and far from an useless life. When he was seventy-four he succeeded to his father's peerage, on the death of his elder brother; but he did not long enjoy the title, by which, indeed, he was not very careful to be distinguished, and in the spring of 1797 he died, within a few months ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... was a very unworthy man, if it were true, to speak slightingly of a family, which was as good as his own, 'bating that it was not allied to the peerage: that the dignity itself, I thought, conveyed more shame than honour to descendants, who had not merit to adorn, as well as to be adorned by it: that my brother's absurd pride, indeed, which made him every where declare, he would never marry but to quality, gave a disgraceful ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... in his Peerage and Baronetage Ed 1879 Pp 885-6, gives a faithful account of the ancestors from whom I am lineally descended. "The family of Naesymth, he says, "is one of remote antiquity in Tweeddale, and has possessed lands there since the 13th century." They fought in the wars of Bruce and Baliol, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... bridge at Lauder. Cochran was now brought out, his hands bound with a rope, and thus conducted to the bridge, and hanged above his fellows."] Later scions of the family prospered, and in 1641, Sir William Cochrane was raised to the peerage, as Lord Cochrane of Cowden, by Charles I. For his adherence to the royal cause this nobleman was fined 5000l. by the Long Parliament in 1654; and, in recompense for his loyalty, he was made first Earl of Dundonald by Charles II. in 1669. His successors were faithful ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... and flattery do? Singly, they are strong impulses; combined, their power is irresistible. I now heard for the first time that our great leader had been elevated to the peerage by the title of Lord Wellington, and I sincerely believe—however now I may smile at the confession—that, at the moment, I felt more elation at the circumstance than he did. The glorious sensation of being in any way, no matter how remotely, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Church? Even a party must draw the line somewhere. It was bad to sacrifice things mundane; but this thing was the very Holy of Holies! Was nothing to be conserved by a Conservative party? What if Mr. Daubeny were to explain some day to the electors of East Barsetshire that an hereditary peerage was an absurdity? What if in some rural nook of his Boeotia he should suggest in ambiguous language to the farmers that a Republic was the only form of Government capable of a logical defence? Duke had already said to Duke, and Earl to Earl, and Baronet to ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various
... made in days agone to show that Washington was of "a noble line"—as if the natural nobility of the man needed a reason—forgetful that we are all sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. But Burke's "Peerage" lends no light, and the careful, unprejudiced, patient search of recent years finds only the blood of ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... their difficult operations 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
... is a chance for you to do some real missionary work, and teach her that 'the rank is but the guinea's stamp,' and that we're all pure gold, 'for a' that and a' that,' no matter if we are not members of the British peerage." ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... has given a hundred thousand to the Prince of Wales's Fund, a hundred thousand to the Red Cross, and a hundred thousand to the party funds. Total net profit on the war, one million seven hundred thousand pounds, not counting the peerage which is now bestowed upon him, and which it must be admitted is a just reward for ...
— The Title - A Comedy in Three Acts • Arnold Bennett
... September 1857 Bunsen attended, as the king's guest, a meeting of the Evangelical Alliance at Berlin; and one of the last papers signed by Frederick William, before his mind gave way in October, was that which conferred upon him the title of baron and a peerage for life. In 1858, at the special request of the regent (afterwards the emperor) William, he took his seat in the Prussian Upper House, and, though remaining silent, supported the new ministry, of which his political and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... next heir to the peerage, in spite of all they may say. But you'll find my lord civil enough soon. He'll be wanting ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... portrait of some baby of distinction, born conveniently at the time. The picture was a great success. Popular taste had been cunningly measured and fitted. This ingenious interleaving of the Bible and the Peerage found a host of admirers. There were some malcontents, of course: ladies whose claims to be ranked among court beauties had been summarily passed over by the painter; for he has rather an invidious task before him who undertakes to decide who are the fifteen most beautiful of English ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... Dignities: Containing Rolls of the Official Personages of the British Empire, Civil, Ecclesiastical, Judicial, Military, Naval, and Municipal, from the Earliest Periods to the Present Time. Together with the Sovereigns of Europe, from the Foundation of their respective States; the Peerage and Nobility of Great Britain, &c. ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... in consequence, during the whole of this Session, and particularly during the present debate, addressed their arguments and exhortations rather to the Lords than to the assembly of which they are themselves Members. Their principal argument has always been, that the bill will destroy the peerage. The honourable and learned Member for Rye has, in plain terms, called on the Barons of England to save their order from democratic encroachments, by rejecting this measure. All these arguments, all these appeals, being interpreted, mean this: "Proclaim to your countrymen ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Rosamund This-or-that; Rosamund, Countess of Thus-and-so; the Honourable Rosamund Such-a-one. She lingered fondly over the baptismal "Rosamund"; what word could match more fitly with a title, or harmonize more completely with the grand old names of the peerage? Once she wrote on the extreme lower corner of the sheet: Mrs. W. F. Bates. "Oh, pshaw!" she exclaimed, and tore the corner off and ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... with his followers at a place called Carlenrig, in Etterick Forest, between Hawick and Langholm, James ordered him to instant execution. Had Johnnie Armstrong, like the Scotts and Kers and Johnstones of like calling, been imprisoned beforehand, he might possibly have lived to found a British peerage; but as it was, the genius of the Armstrong dynasty was for a time extinguished, only, however, to reappear, after the lapse of a few centuries, in the person of the eminent engineer of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the inventor ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Cheapside who had just been made a peer had divided his gains into three equal parts; one for the purchase of the peerage, country house and park, and the twenty thousand pheasants that are absolutely essential, and one for the upkeep of the position, while the third he banked abroad, partly to cheat the native tax-gatherer and partly because it seemed to him that the days of the Peerage were few and ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... among treasures, a rich and priceless gem. For at this Table nearly every man upon the Staff has, from the day it was made, sat and carved his initials upon it with a penknife, when officially elevated to Punch's peerage. As each has died, his successor has taken his place—just as the Institut de France creates Immortals to fill the chairs made vacant by death—and he has cut his initials or his mark close by those of the men who occupied the place ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... &c.), 85 landowners, 64 merchants and shopkeepers, 37 army and navy men, 33 journalists and authors, 28 financiers, 23 professors, teachers, &c., 18 Civil servants, 18 newspaper proprietors and publishers, 16 heirs to the peerage, 67 of miscellaneous occupations and professions, and 50 working men. Thus the bulk of the present House of Commons consists of rent, profit, and interest mongers and their hirelings and hangers-on. The exploited masses of the people are only ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... descent. At all events, he had made a special study of the wraiths and white ladies and banshees and bogies of all kinds whose sayings and doings and warnings are recorded in the annals of the Scottish nobility. In fact, he was acquainted with the habits of every reputable spook in the Scotch peerage. And he knew that there was a Duncan ghost attached to the person of the holder of the title of ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... powers to continue their resistance to French aggression. He continued his campaign in Thoughts on French Affairs and Letters on a Regicide Peace. He was given two pensions in 1794, and would have been raised to the peerage as Lord Beaconsfield, had not the succession to the title been cut off by the premature death of his only son. He himself died in 1797 and was buried at Beaconsfield, where, as far back as 1768, he had purchased a ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... and party finances? It would be absurd, and even delightfully absurd, to pretend that any of them did. It would be a wild and charming fancy to suggest that our politicians keep political secrets only that they may make political revelations. A modern peer only pretends that he has earned his peerage in order that he may more dramatically declare, with a scream of scorn and joy, that he really bought it. The Baronet pretends that he deserved his title only in order to make more exquisite and startling the grand historical ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... Saxon and Norman race, are, chiefly by the mutations of time, and of state, either become extinct, or as above, reduced to the lowest verge of fortune. Those few therefore, whose descent is traceable, may be carried higher than that of the present nobility; for I know none of these last, who claim peerage beyond Edward the first, about 1295. Hence it follows, that for antiquity, alliance, and blood, the advantage is evidently in favour of the ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... possessed of a fickle, unstable and coquettish temperament. Oh, no! You may depend upon it, Agatha, the fact that she contemplates purchasing the right to support a peculiarly disreputable member of the British peerage will not hinder her in the least from making advances to all the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... daughter of Thomas Smythe, Esq., Farmer of the Customs to Queen Elizabeth, the younger son of an ancient Wiltshire family, and ancestor of the Viscounts Strangford; and that his eldest brother was raised to the peerage by the title of Viscount ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... "Justice will no doubt be done; but the question does not lie between you and me, but between me and Alured. It is, as I said, a peerage question—and will be decided by the peers. Incidentally, that enquiry will prove what is your position and rank, as well as what may or may not be ours. Any further points depend upon my father's will, and that will be in the hands of Mr. Eagles. I think you can ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sole director, Of wit and learning chief protector; Though small the time thou hast to spare, The church is thy peculiar care. Of pious prelates what a stock You choose, to rule the sable flock! You raise the honour of your peerage, Proud to attend you at the steerage; You dignify the noble race, Content yourself with humbler place. Now learning, valour, virtue, sense, To titles give the sole pretence. St George beheld thee ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... whom we shall call Lord Woodville. How fortunate! Much of Browne's early recollections, both at school and at college, had been connected with young Woodville, whom, by a few questions, he now ascertained to be the same with the owner of this fair domain. He had been raised to the peerage by the decease of his father a few months before, and, as the General learned from the landlord, the term of mourning being ended, was now taking possession of his paternal estate, in the jovial season of merry autumn, accompanied by a select party of friends ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... letter was read from Lord BEAVERBROOK, in which the great financier declared that, in arriving at the peerage at the age of thirty-seven, he had found his inability to read HOMER freely in the original no handicap or hindrance. He pointed out the interesting fact that Lord NORTHCLIFFE, who reached a similar elevation at the age of forty, had never composed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... one of those natures that can lock their griefs within the bosom, and let them lie there till in process of time they shrivel away. Except among members of the peerage, as pictured in current literature, these stern, proud creatures are not common. Man, whether he figures in the world as a peer or a hedge-carpenter, is, as a matter of fact, mentally as well as physically, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... the "fittest" are not able to perpetuate their type. Ritchie, in his "Darwinism and Politics" ("Darwinism and Politics" pages 9, 22, London, 1889.) reminds us of Darwin's remark that the institution of the peerage might be defended on the ground that peers, owing to the prestige they enjoy, are enabled to select as wives "the most beautiful and charming women out of the lower ranks." ("Life and Letters of Charles ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... domestic life, his many and pleasant relations with General Jackson, George M. Dallas, and most of the leading men of his own times. We close this short notice with a quotation from Charles J. Ingersoll: 'A purer, sweeter, or superior spirit seldom has departed. He belonged to a peerage of which there are very few members.' We doubt not this important record will obtain ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was a legal opinion given to a claimant of the Annandale peerage, who, when pressing the employment of some obvious forgeries, was warned, that if he persevered, nae doot he might be a peer, but it would be a peer o' ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... and 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 ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... block. Wentworth, the son of a Yorkshire gentleman, was born in 1593 in Chancery Lane, at the house of Mr. Atkinson, his maternal grandfather, a bencher of Lincoln's Inn. At first an enemy of Buckingham, the king's favourite, and opposed to the Court, he was won over by a peerage and the counsels of his friend Lord Treasurer Weston. He soon became a headlong and unscrupulous advocate of arbitrary power, and, as Lord Deputy of Ireland, did his best to raise an army for the king and ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... misrepresented, exaggerated, and circulated in all quarters. We like those whom we love to be fortunate. Everybody rejoices in the good luck of a popular character; and soon it was generally understood that Ferdinand Armine had become next in the entail to thirty thousand a year and a peerage. Moreover, he was not long to wait for his inheritance. The usurers pricked up their ears, and such numerous proffers of accommodation and assistance were made to the fortunate Mr. Armine, that he really found it quite impossible to refuse them, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... hands—distinction all over—ugly distinction! Now, if you'd only an estate and a mansion, and a park, and a title, how you could play the exclusive, maintain the rights of your class, train your tenantry in habits of respect to the peerage, oppose at every step the advancing power of the people, support your rotten order, and be ready for its sake to wade knee-deep in churls' blood; as it is, you've no power; you can do nothing; you're wrecked and stranded on the shores of ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... saying: 'Oh, but you're as bad as that sort of person who can't be made to realise that the oldest peerage in Ireland counts for nothing in comparison with an oil-king's millions and being able to entertain the right set.... And besides, really Mr McKeith, there's no difference at all between us. You talk such a lot about YOUR grandfather having been a Scotch peasant. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... inherit the estates, which went to a distant relation; but at the death of the marquis, at a good old age, he left a fortune to his daughter, which enabled her husband still further to extend his estates. Had Rupert desired it, he could have been raised to the peerage, but he preferred remaining one of the wealthiest ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... of some histrionic ability, gallantly offered to perform for her benefit. The colonel was notorious for his gallantries; under a promise of marriage—which could not then, he said, be carried into effect, inasmuch as he was then petitioning the Crown to grant him the dormant peerage, which a marriage with an actress could not fail to prejudice—he succeeded in accomplishing her seduction, and she continued to live under his "protection" till, on the birth of her second child, she arrived at the true conviction that he never had any intention of fulfilling ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... part of the nation more hateful than to the 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
... twelve years on the throne of that nation, which (by the happy issue of moderate and healing councils) was to be made Great Britain, he should see his son, Lord Chancellor of England, turn back the current of hereditary dignity to its fountain, and raise him to higher rank of peerage whilst he enriched the family with a new one. If, amidst these bright and happy scenes of domestic honor and prosperity, that angel should have drawn up the curtain and unfolded the rising glories of his country, and whilst he was gazing with admiration on the then commercial grandeur ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... strong Opposition, would, of course, eagerly welcome the aid of any abstract principle, that might sanction him in resisting such a mutilation of the Royal power;—well knowing that (as in the case of the Peerage Bill in the reign of George I.) the proceedings altogether were actuated more by ill-will to the successor in the trust, than by any sincere zeal for ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... spare a moment to introduce Sandy to the reader, for he cannot be allowed to slip into this tale by a side-door. If you will consult the Peerage you will find that to Edward Cospatrick, fifteenth Baron Clanroyden, there was born in the year 1882, as his second son, Ludovick Gustavus Arbuthnot, commonly called the Honourable, etc. The said son was educated ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... away; to say nothing of the leaves that had fallen and the growth and decay of so 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 Middleton a strange thrill of pleasure, that had something fearful in it, to think ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I. for his conduct at the battle of Edgehill, and appointed Governor of Appleby Castle, in Westmorland, and afterwards of Newark, which he defended with great honour. Sir Richard, on the death of his brother, in 1652, succeeded to the peerage, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... long known at Somersby, the daughter of a lawyer, and niece of Sir John Franklin. In 1855 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford and in 1884, being then in his seventy-fifth year, he was raised to the peerage under the title of Baron Tennyson of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... pursued. Sir William Penn had already received numerous rewards and honours for the services he had rendered to his sovereign, and he had every reason to believe that he would have been raised to the peerage. His son William had, however, refused to accept any title, and he had therefore declined the honour for himself. He was now, however, at the early age of forty-nine, struck by a mortal disease, and he had begun to estimate more ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... Pickwick Club, one may usefully employ the imagination in tracing out the possible careers of Sam Weller's chubby little boys; grown into old men, and themselves, perchance, leaving progeny that may have married into the peerage from the Turf, or have entered the War Cabinet at the beckoning of Mr. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... bit about them, I assure you," he said to her; "but I have the 'Peerage.' If you would like to see that, I will send it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... succeeded his grandfather in 1377, reaped the whirlwind of Edward's sowing, not so much in the consequences of the war as in the fruits of his peerage policy. The fourteenth century which nationalized the Commons, isolated the Lords; and the baronage shrank into the peerage. The word "peer" is not of English origin, nor has it any real English meaning. ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... 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 dates) ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the spirit of Hebrew Poetry, here represents the Crown, the Peerage, and the Commonalty, by the figurative expression of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... private letter to the English Secretary of State, giving the minister a graphic account of the rare doings of yesterday, and assuring the minister, from his own personal and ocular experience, that a member of one of the highest orders of the British peerage carried in the procession a lighted taper after two angels with amaranthine ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... Rebellion, 1807, i. 216) as "a person of great affability and dexterity, as well as martial knowledge." He was Governor of Carlisle, and afterwards Governor of Chester. His nephew and heir-at-law, Sir John Byron, of Clayton, K.B. (1599-1652), was raised to the peerage as Baron Byron of Rochdale, after the Battle of Newbury, October 26, 1643. He held successively the posts of Lieutenant of the Tower, Governor of Chester, and, after the expulsion of the Royal Family from England, Governor to the Duke of York. He died childless, and ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... her spiritual director could have ascended the Episcopal throne. The title of Carbery was at that time an earldom; the earl married again, arid his second countess was also a devout patroness of Taylor. Having no peerage at hand, I do not know by what mode of derivation the modern title of the nineteenth century had descended from the old one of the seventeenth. I presume that some collateral branch of the original family had succeeded to the barony when the limitations of the original settlement had extinguished ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... essayist, and politician, Edward Bulwer Lytton was born in London on May 25, 1805. His father was General Earle Bulwer. He assumed his mother's family name on her death in 1843, and was elevated to the peerage as Baron Lytton in 1866. At seventeen Lytton published a volume entitled, "Ismael, and Other Poems." An unhappy marriage in 1827 was followed by extraordinary literary activity, and during the next ten years he produced twelve novels, two poems, a play, "England and the English," ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... the most remarkable discoveries he has made, is, that "the soap-makers and the brewers are the compounders of the great staple commodities of consumption in Great Britain, and therefore surpass even Charles himself in the number of their additions to the Peerage." This valuable hint should not be lost upon those employed in these useful occupations, as hope is calculated to stimulate ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... Francis Hopwood. He became Sir Francis in 1906, and from then onwards advanced from office to office and from honour to honour, until, during his secretaryship of the Irish Convention in 1917, his public services were rewarded with a peerage. As railway secretary of the Board of Trade he was particularly distinguished for tact, strength and moderation. Singularly courteous and obliging on all occasions, I, personally, have been much indebted to him ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... 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, irritated by the hostile ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... that he never worked at all. He becomes as far as possible another person—a country gentleman who has never heard of his shop; one whose left hand holding a gun knows not what his right hand doeth in a ledger. He uses a peerage as an alias, and a large estate as a sort of alibi. A stern Scotch minister remarked concerning the game of golf, with a terrible solemnity of manner, "the man who plays golf—he neglects his business, he forsakes ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... reproaches, and cries up the cause. That year in which the city he did sway, 290 He left rebellion in a hopeful way, Yet his ambition once was found so bold, To offer talents of extorted gold; Could David's wants have so been bribed, to shame And scandalize our peerage with his name; For which, his dear sedition he'd forswear, And e'en turn loyal to be made a peer. Next him, let railing Rabsheka have place, So full of zeal he has no need of grace; A saint that can both flesh and spirit use, 300 Alike haunt conventicles and the stews: ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Perceval, offering my husband the choice of a seat in the Cabinet. Mr. Milnes immediately said, 'Oh, no, I will not accept either; with my temperament I should be dead in a year.' And nothing could induce him to do so either," continued Mrs. Henniker, "nor could he be induced to accept the Peerage which was offered him ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 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 as those we ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... much as is necessary. He need not study anatomy, and walk a hospital, in order to indicate with a few graphic gestures the cripple's limp. Equally he need not be a superb swordsman in order to get through an effective stage combat. It is not absolutely essential that he should be elevated to the peerage before being permitted to play a duke. People talk about fencing, dancing, and elocution, as if actors had nothing to do but fence, dance, and spout. An actor has to simulate everything, from "shouts off" to a crowned king in the centre of the stage. As in all probability neither the unseen ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... cheeks, and this without touching a single tooth. Whether this affected the flavour of the orange is not told, but the historian gravely records that "when the wound in each cheek healed, a pair of not unseemly dimples remained." Happy middy! He would scarcely envy Nelson his peerage. ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... have to show how he could have been kept a State prisoner for life for offences he had committed before the rising of February, and, moreover, how the imprisoned living father was to make way in his peerage for the son. On the other theory which presumes it to have been an argument for sending Essex to the scaffold, it is as unintelligible how the father's fate, with its necessary attainder of blood, could legally ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Clanranald fell, Glengarry tossed his bonnet in the air, crying in Gaelic, 'Revenge! Revenge! Revenge to- day, and mourning to-morrow.' He then led a charge, and drove the regular British troops in rout. He received a warrant of a peerage from the King ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... 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, ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... King Henry VII. at Windsor. The king was also impressed with Russell, and appointed him to an office in the court, and three years afterwards, Henry VIII. becoming king, Russell was entrusted with many important duties, and was raised to the peerage as Baron Russell. He enjoyed the king's favor throughout his long reign, and was made one of the councillors of his son, Edward VI., besides holding other high offices, and when the youthful prince ascended the throne he made Russell an earl and gave him the magnificent domain of Woburn Abbey. ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... aught I know a left-hand milliner is as good these Republican days. Anyhow, 'tis so, and Horry, who would have all think him above such thoughts, is most demurely conceited that a Walpole— ahem!—should grace the British peerage. Remains now only Charlotte, and I dare swear she will carry her charms to no worse market than Maria, though not ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... worse. The emperor raised Nancy Peters to the peerage on one day, and married her the next, notwithstanding, for reasons of state, the cabinet had strenuously advised him to marry Emmeline, eldest daughter of the Archbishop of Bethlehem. This caused trouble in a powerful ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it all unperturbed. It was just what he knew she could and would do; and he foresaw for Byng, if he wanted it, a peerage in the not distant future. Alice Tynemouth was no gossip, and she was not malicious. She had a good, if wayward, heart, was full of sentiment, and was a constant and helpful friend. He, therefore, accepted her invitation ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... universal guardian of the public and private interests which composed the great edifice of the social system as then existing amongst his subjects. Above all, and out of his own private purse, he supported the heraldries of his dominions—the peerage, senatorial or prtorian, and the great gentry or chivalry of the Equites. These were classes who would have been dishonored by the censorship of a less august comptroller. And, for the classes below these,—by how much they were lower and more ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... financial loser by his action, and even if he is not actually assisting to topple over the Money God, he is at least striking a blow for the cause of independence. However, there he is, and with him goes a certain M.P. who contributed 20,000 to the party chest, and refused scornfully the peerage which ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... the country, and fond of "stones," get a geologist's hammer, and Hugh Miller's books, and give yourself up to happiness. Or if you like flowers, study them; learning to know families and sub-families through all the floral peerage. ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner
... 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 ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... for the colonies. He was 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 cabinet seems to ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... after an election in which he had spent the last of his money, he was "counted out" in favor of a rather hod character named O'GLOORAL. Thus practically taught to understand the political genius of a Republic, which, as gloriously contrasted with any effete monarchy ruled by a Peerage, looks for its own governing class to the Steerage, Mr. WILLIAM ADAMS subsided impecuniously into plain BILL ADAMS and a book-keepership in dry goods; and was ultimately blurred into BLADAMS and employment as a copyist by Mr. DIBBLE, to whom his experience of spending every ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... morning I called with Lord Ernest Hamilton upon Sir Bernard Burke, the Ulster King-at-Arms, and the editor or author of many other well-known publications, and especially of the "Peerage," sometimes irreverently spoken of ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... necessarily by itself regarded as sufficient), provided the woman is of unblemished character, and does not appear to be a common prostitute (Nevill Geary, The Law of Marriage, Ch. III). If, however, according to Lord Watson's judicial statement in the Dysart Peerage case, a man takes his mistress to a hotel or goes with her to a baby-linen shop and speaks of her as his wife, it is to be presumed that he is acting for the sake of decency, and this furnishes no ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... stuck on the end of twelve-foot poles. The platform was a large lorry, and there were several speakers, including Adam Sweater himself and a real live Liberal Peer—Lord Ammenegg. This individual had made a considerable fortune in the grocery and provision line, and had been elevated to the Peerage by the last Liberal Government on account of his services to the Party, and ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... powerful. Their object was to be safe in every event. They therefore openly took the oath of allegiance to one King, and secretly plighted their word to the other. They were indefatigable in obtaining commissions, patents of peerage, pensions, grants of crown land, under the great seal of William; and they had in their secret drawers promises of pardon in the handwriting ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... declaring that when the king invested a man with a sufficient holding of land or fief, he became ipso facto a noble. This is the same common-sense policy which led Sir Robert Peel to declare, that any man with an income of $50,000 a year had a right to a peerage. There can be no aristocracy except of the powerful, which lasts. The difference to-day is seen in the puppet nobility of Austria, Italy, Spain, and Germany as compared with the nobility of England, which is not a nobility of birth or of tradition, but of the powerful: brewers ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... 'sticky, stuffy, starched, and bored porpoise—yes, PORPOISE!' (shaking her head as if to establish the metaphor against the whole of the English aristocracy). In short, it was the spirit of the Ironmonger castigating the Peerage, and at its conclusion Lady Durwent felt much abused, and quite pleased with her ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... no money, and are obliged to make a good show.—Again, you know the difficulties of the political situation. The aristocracy has to be rehabilitated in the face of a very strong force of the third estate. The King's idea—and France does him scant justice—is to create a peerage as a national institution analogous to the English peerage. To realize this grand idea we need years—and millions.—Noblesse oblige. The Duc de Navarreins, who is, as you know, first gentleman of the Bedchamber to the King, does not repudiate ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and died in fighting King Charles's battles. Of his two sons, the elder, Basil, who succeeded to the title, was a Parliamentarian, and served at Edgehill under Essex. George, his second son, was raised to the peerage of Ireland as Viscount Callan, with succession to the earldom of Desmond; and from this, the younger branch of the Denbigh family, Henry Fielding directly descended. The Earl of Desmond's fifth son, John, ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... heart. It even vents its exuberance in bubbles of levity and elaborate trifling, so that all but the very light-hearted are fain to say: Something too much of this. Compared with our standard humorists—the peerage, or Upper House, who sit sublimely aloft, like 'Jove in his chair, of the sky my lord mayor'—Southey may be but a dull commoner, one of the third or fourth estate. But for all that, he has a comfortable ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... interests. The elements of such a rupture were already in existence. The aristocracy of the rich, which had risen as one man against Tiberius Gracchus, consisted in fact of two essentially dissimilar bodies, which may be in some measure compared to the peerage and the city aristocracy of England. The one embraced the practically closed circle of the governing senatorial families who kept aloof from direct speculation and invested their immense capital partly in landed property, partly as sleeping partners in the great associations. The core of the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Earl of Dorset and lord-treasurer—was then fifty-one years of age. A man of large culture-poet, dramatist, diplomatist-bred to the bar; afterwards elevated to the peerage; endowed with high character and strong intellect; ready with tongue and pen; handsome of person, and with a fascinating address, he was as fit a person to send on a mission of expostulation as any man to be found in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Orlando.l When Charlemain 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 ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... receives his instructions from the Secretary of State for India, who represents that part of the empire both in the ministry and in parliament. The present viceroy is the Right Honorable George Nathaniel Curzon, who was raised to the peerage in October, 1898, as Baron Curzon of Kedleston. He is the eldest son of Lord Scarsdale, was born Jan. 11, 1859, was educated at Eton and Oxford; selected journalism as his profession; became correspondent of the London Times in China, India and Persia; was elected to parliament from Lancashire ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... King and the age; but Bacon was advanced through various legal offices, until in 1613 he was made Attorney-General and in 1618 (two years after Shakspere's death) Lord High Chancellor of England, at the same time being raised to the peerage as Baron Verulam. During all this period, in spite of his better knowledge, he truckled with sorry servility to the King and his unworthy favorites and lent himself as an agent in their most arbitrary acts. Retribution overtook him in 1621, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... 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. ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... 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
... (1526-1556). At the latter's death it became dormant in the Courtenay family, till in 1831 a claim by a collateral branch was allowed by the House of Lords, and the earldom of Devon was restored to the peerage, still being held by the head of the Courtenays. The earlier earls of Devon were referred to occasionally as earls of Devonshire, but the former variant has prevailed, and the latter is now solely used for the earldom and dukedom held by the Cavendishes ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... the House of Coombe was not a title to be found in Burke or Debrett. It was a fine irony of the Head's own and having been accepted by his acquaintances was not infrequently used by them in their light moments in the same spirit. The peerage recorded him as a Marquis and added ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Deronda is not so very high," said Kate, "He need not hinder us from thinking ill of the whole peerage and ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... State forces was, in truth, established even before the House of Commons became what it now is, representative of the people throughout its entire area. In the early part of the century, a large part of its members virtually received their mandate from members of the Peerage, or from the Crown, or by the direct action of money on a mere handful of individuals, or, as in Scotland, for example, from constituencies whose limited numbers and upper-class sympathies usually shut out ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... proclamations and declarations against the parliament, and acknowledge that assembly to have taken arms in their just and necessary defence. By the third, he was to annul all the acts, and void all the patents of peerage, which had passed the great seal since it had been carried from London by Lord Keeper Littleton; and at the same time, renounce for the future the power of making peers without consent of parliament. By the fourth, he gave the two houses ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... Say not so, dear BULLSAYE—have you not just rendered me the happiest little Patrician in the whole peerage? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... 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 Lieutenant-Colonelcies, and 13 majorities ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... even retain their position as a ruling caste. Mixed Celts in England itself have long since risen to many high places. Leading families of Welsh, Cornish, Scotch, and Irish blood have also been admitted into the peerage of the United Kingdom, and form a large proportion of the House of Commons, of the official world, and of the governing class in India, the Colonies, and the empire generally. These families have again ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... benefactors, always excepting the last Royal Governor of New Hampshire, John Wentworth, whose care for all the interests of the Province is a matter of enduring record. Of the distinguished person in honor of whom the College was named, the following account, published in 1779, is from "Collins' Peerage": ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... this time. For although it is acknowledged, and has been taught by all philosophers from King Lemuel and Lao-Kiun downward, that no greater prize can be gained by any man than the love of a good woman, which is better than a Peerage—better than a Bonanza mine—better than Name and Fame, Kudos and the newspaper paragraph, and is arrived at by much less exertion, being indeed the special gift of the gods to those they love; yet all women perfectly ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... the state was the Nobility. It is a mistake, however, to suppose that this word bears on the Continent exactly the same meaning as in England. Where all the children of a nobleman are nobles, a strict class is created. An English peerage, descending only to the eldest son, is more in the nature of an office. The French noblesse in the latter years of the old monarchy comprised nearly all persons living otherwise than by their daily toil, together ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... public 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 wound the ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... obnoxious publication to provoke censure, and leaves it to shift for itself for fear of scandal. We do not like Sir Walter's gratuitous servility: we like Lord Byron's preposterous liberalism little better. He may affect the principles of equality, but he resumes his privilege of peerage, upon occasion. His Lordship has made great offers of service to the Greeks—money and horses. He is at present in ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... wait, to infer two classes of nebulae; one that were stars; and another that were not stars, nor ever were meant to be stars. Yet that was premature: he found at last, that, though not raised to the peerage of stars, finally they would be so: they were the matter of stars; and by gradual condensation would become suns, whose atmosphere, by a similar process of condensing, would become planets, capable of brilliant literati and philosophers, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... good dinner, and who is too happy to be asked any where that a good dinner is to be had; a young silky clergyman, in black curled whiskers, and a white choker; one of the meaner fry of M.P.'s; a person who calls himself a foreign count; a claimant of a dormant peerage; a baronet of some sort, not above the professional; sundry propriety-faced people in yellow waistcoats, who say little, and whose social position you cannot well make out; half-a-dozen ladies of an uncertain age, dressed in grand style, with turbans of imposing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... the phrase "belted Earl," is used advisedly. At the period of which Sir WALTER SCOTT wrote (vide any of his novels) it will be found that members of this rank of the Peerage are all spoken of as belted. For some time the fashion fell out of use. The belt was appropriately revived by the late Earl of BEACONSFIELD, and is now quite a common thing with the aristocracy. The Earl of SELBORNE is very particular about the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... Peerage of Ireland an account of an Irish nurse, who went from Kerry to France, and from France to Milan, to see her foster-son, the Lord Thomas Fitzmaurice; and to warn him that his estate was in danger from an heir-at-law, who had taken possession of it in his absence. The ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... 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 ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... or four minutes by a bellows and will then sustain six or eight persons—forming a kind of boat which it is almost impossible to overturn. A trial was to be made of its efficacy.—Sir Thomas Wilde has been made Lord Chancellor and raised to the peerage by the title of Baron Truro of Bowes, in the County of Middlesex.—Sir Robert Peel, Bart., has been returned to Parliament for the borough of Tamworth made vacant by the death of his father. It is stated that Sir Robert's last injunction was that his ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... not she also a radical? She talks of the emancipation of women by keeping them at school till one-and-twenty, of the elevation of the masses, and the mutual improvement of everybody not in the peerage." ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... answered, exasperated. "That is my case at any rate, and what I want to know now is if I have your support in my suit. Remember, I have something to offer, Haswell, for instance, a large fortune of which I will settle half—it is a good thing to do in our business,—and a baronetcy that will be a peerage before long." ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... English king can prove such descent, though he can prove it only through a long and complicated web of female successions. But we may be sure that in no other case can such a pedigree be proved by the kind of proof which lawyers would require to make out the title to an estate or a peerage. The actual forefathers of the modern Englishman may chance to have been, not true-born Angles or Saxons, but Britons, Scots, in later days Frenchmen, Flemings, men of any other nation who learned to speak English and took to themselves English names. But supposing that a man could make out such ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the young lady the justice to state that, though her future husband was no great things as a 'man,' as she afterwards discovered, he was the heir to a peerage and great wealth. Both he and she, like most of my collaborators in this world, have long since passed ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... pulpit was especially severe against him, declaring that his researches were destroying religion and his experiments undermining the university. Public orators denounced him, the wits ridiculed him, and his associates in the peerage were indignant that he should condescend to pursuits so unworthy. But Boyle pressed on. His discoveries opened new paths in various directions and gave an impulse to a succession of vigorous investigators. Thus began the long series of discoveries culminating those ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... to-day. When, for example, Perry and Bindley left off, Daniel commenced. There was no great rush after Shakespeare quartos in the earlier part of the present century, and book-collecting for a time ceased to be the pet hobby of wealthy members of the peerage. When George Daniel, a critic and bibliographer of exceptional abilities, began to collect, he soon made Shakespeare, as well as the earlier English poets, objects of solicitude. He resided for many years ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... known as the Eastern Townships,[23] and spent the autumn in a tour through the Western part of the newly united colony. It was only fitting that a grateful Queen and Ministry should bestow on him a peerage; henceforward he must appear as Baron ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... courted the favor of the king's mistress. The Cardinal of Lorraine, in particular, distinguished himself by the servility which he displayed. For two years he put himself to infinite trouble to be at the table of Diana.[555] After her elevation to the peerage, he addressed to her a letter, still extant, in which he assured her that henceforth his interest and hers were inseparable.[556] To give yet greater firmness to the bond uniting them, the Guises brought about a marriage between their third brother, the Duke of Aumale, and ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... member of the Legislative Commission, unless removed from office on an address from Parliament, should be a peer for life, it is probable that the same good sense and taste which leave the judicial functions of the peerage practically to the exclusive care of the law lords would leave the business of legislation, except on questions involving political principles and interests, to the professional legislators; that bills originating in the Upper House would always be drawn up by them; that the government would ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... out the more earnest workers. Here is a student with the thirty or more volumes of the "New England Historic Genealogical Register" piled before him, flanked on one side by the huge volumes of Burke's "Peerage" and on the other by Walford's "County Families." There are many readers of this class, the library's department of Genealogy and Heraldry being well filled. There is a lady here and there at the tables working with a male companion, but, as a rule, they are to be found at the ladies' ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... these damnatory facts, he was a local Tory of some renown—an ambitious man, the neighbours said, who wished to leave his son a peerage. ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... the masses are coming up; and the wealthy and the noble are more considerate. It is a great folly and a wickedness to think that the nobility of England are weak, vicious, unfeeling, proud, and self-indulgent. Some of the noblest characters of England are to be found in the peerage—men who "fear God and work righteousness." Their homes are often centres of diffusive blessedness; and were the nobility of England what too many here suppose them, the state could not last a twelvemonth. The queen is popular, and is clearly a woman of great tact. She ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... of this book there will be some recital of the victories won by the fire-maker, the electrician, the photographer, and many more in the peerage of experiment and research. Underlying the sketch will appear the significant contrast betwixt accessions of minor and of supreme dignity. The finding a new wood, such as that of the yew, means better bows for the archer, stronger handles ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... family, in a situation between majesty and subjection, between the sovereign and the subject,—offering a pledge in that situation for the support of the rights of the crown and the liberties of the people, both which extremities they touch. My Lords, we have a great hereditary peerage here,—those who have their own honor, the honor of their ancestors and of their posterity to guard, and who will justify, as they have always justified, that provision in the Constitution by which justice is made an hereditary office. My Lords, we have here a new nobility, who have risen and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and magnanimity." Lord Denbigh fell, covered with wounds, when fighting as a volunteer in Prince Rupert's troop; while his eldest son, Basil, then a mere youth, fought as hotly for the Parliament. Lord Denbigh's second son, who like his father was a devoted loyalist, received a peerage, being created Earl of Desmond; and two of his sons figure in a wild and tragic story preserved by Pepys. "In our street," says the Diarist, writing in 1667, "at the Three Tuns Tavern I find a great hubbub; and what was it but two brothers had fallen out and ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... denounced the inaccuracies and fictions of the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth. At the Dissolution Newburgh was given by Henry VIII to Anthony Belasyse, the punning motto of whose family was Bonne et belle assez. One of his descendants was created Lord Fauconberg by Charles I, and the peerage became extinct in 1815, on the death of the seventh to bear the title. The last owner—Sir George Wombwell, Bart.—inherited the property from his grandmother, who was a daughter of the last Lord Fauconberg. Sir George was one of the three surviving officers ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... but for Southern Europe as well, an approximate knowledge even of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the coasts of the White Sea. His work, dedicated to Roger and called after him, Al-Rojary, was rewarded with a peerage, and it was as a Sicilian Count that he finished his Celestial Sphere and Terrestrial Disc of silver, on which "was inscribed all the circuit of the known world and all ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... A Resolution of the Court of Common Council, or of a meeting at Freemasons' Hall, has often made a greater sensation than this declaration of a branch of the Legislature against the Executive Government. The institution of the Peerage is evidently dying ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... alliance,—so splendid that its history was at the time known to all the aristocracy of the county, and had not been altogether forgotten by any of those who keep themselves well instructed in the details of the peerage. Griselda Grantly had married Lord Dumbello, the eldest son of the Marquis of Hartletop,—than whom no English nobleman was more puissant, if broad acres, many castles, high title, and stars and ribbons are any sign of ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... forward, there is therefore no opposing force to its advance.(121) Mr. Doubleday maintains that, as people become better fed, they become unprolific. Mr. Mill's answer, referring to the large families of the English peerage, is unfortunate.(122) In Sweden the increase of the peasantry is six times that of the middle classes, and fourteen times that of the nobility. The diminishing fertility of New England families gives a truer explanation, when it ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... utmost confidence, placed him in charge of his private affairs, and appointed him one of his cabinet ministers. On the 20th of March, Monsieur de Serizy did not go to Ghent. He informed Napoleon that he remained faithful to the house of Bourbon; would not accept his peerage during the Hundred Days, and passed that period ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... 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 Dauntless ...
— The Flyers • George Barr McCutcheon
... toy-horses, and making them, with suicidal irony, deplore the hardships of comrades in the Crimea. He sneers at the loungers, and the delicate, dissipated roues of the club-house,—though their names were once worn by renowned ancestors, and are in the peerage. Fast young men are to him befooled prodigals, wasting the wealth of life in profitless living. He is not, however, an anchorite, or hard upon youth. On the contrary, he is an indulgent old fellow, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... tame herself and them to the duties of the long day of anticipation so joyous on their part, so full of confusion and bewildered anxiety on her own. She looked in vain, half stealthily, as often before, for a recent Army List or Peerage. Long ago she had lost the Honourable Colin A. Keith from among the officers of the —th Highlanders, and though in the last Peerage she had laid hands on he was still among the surviving sons of the late Lord Keith, of Gowanbrae, the date had not gone back far ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... delicate Louis XVI. desk, on which lay a Bible, a Peerage, a telephone-book, a telephone, a lamp and much distinguished stationery. Between the tasselled folds of plushy curtains that pleated themselves with the grandeur of painted curtains in a theatre, he glanced out at the lights of Devonshire ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... of the revolution. A more numerous band of fighting men of English origin, in Garibaldi's ranks, would have shown more sympathy with rebellion in some Italian States than the proposal made by a right honorable member of the richest peerage in the world to raise a penny subscription in order to supply the rebels with bayonets and fire-arms. When we call to mind that this suggestion was made by that very lordly peer who was once Governor-General of India, we have little difficulty in understanding ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... the ruins of a castle,[50] memorable for the thirty days' siege, which it supported from the army of Henry Ist, in 1122; and dismantled by Charles Vth, at the same time that he razed the fortifications of Pont-Audemer. The Baron of Montfort yet ranks in our peerage; though I am not aware that the nobleman, who at present bears the title, boasts a descent from any part of the family of Hugh with a beard, the owner of Montfort at the time of the conquest, and one of the Conqueror's attendants at the battle ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... Castlewood, in the county of Hants; and it was pretty generally known that King James II. and his son had offered the title of Marquis to Colonel Esmond and his father, and that the former might have assumed the (Irish) peerage hereditary in his family, but for an informality which he did not choose to set right. Tired of the political struggles in which he had been engaged, and annoyed by family circumstances in Europe, he preferred to establish himself in Virginia, where he ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and most pointed legal sanction that sovereignty could contrive, voluntarily descending into a plain, upon an equal level with Jews, Papists, Socinians, Arminians, Anabaptists, and other sectaries, etc. I think I see the noble and honorable peerage of Scotland, whose valiant predecessors led armies against their enemies, upon their own proper charges and expenses, now divested of their followers and vassalages, and put upon such an equal foot with their vassals, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... letter is now published for the first time. It will be found to be of very considerable historical curiosity and interest. The resignation of the Great Commoner in 1761, and his acceptance at the same time of a pension and a peerage for his family, were events which astonished his admirers as much as any thing else in his wonderful career. Even now, after the recent publication of all the letters relating to these transactions, it is difficult to put any construction on Mr. Pitt's conduct which is consistent ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.01 • Various
... until, in speaking of the universal manner in 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 know of a Lord Mayor who plays the trombone, ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... sure I was prouder of that than of my peerage, for I experienced for the first time the joyous pride of independence. There is no fruit of ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... be 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 ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... 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 me to my own ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... to be infatuated with mere boys; he had known well-born women to marry grooms and chauffeurs; a Peer of his acquaintance had linked himself to a cabman's daughter and stuck to her; chorus girls of course perpetually married into the Peerage; human passions—although he could not understand it—ran as wild as the roots of eucalyptus trees planted high within reach of water. So he could not rule out as impossible a sudden affection for Adela Sellingworth in the heart of young Craven. It was really very unfortunate. Feeling responsible, ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... PEER has no connection with his peerage; they might happen to any other man whose posterity ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... accession to the peerage, the rise of Lumley Ferrers had been less rapid and progressive than he himself could have foreseen. At first, all was sunshine before him; he had contrived to make himself useful to his party; he had also made ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... hidden space was found in one of the chimneys, and there, covered with the dust of a century, lay a silver watch, a silk guard attached, and seals bearing the Lovat crest. The relic was promptly claimed by Mr. John Fraser, the claimant to the long-disputed peerage.[1] ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... Avonmore got his peerage for voting for the Union, he had his patent of nobility read out at a dinner-party, and it commenced, 'George, of the United Kingdom ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... prove 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 his father's unbounded satisfaction ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... of the first members of the Ecclesiastical Commission (1835). During his primacy there were two fires in the minster, and he gave largely to the restoration fund. In 1838 he declined the renewal of the Harcourt peerage. He died at Bishopthorpe. ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... will you have in me, secretly, an obliged friend who could be of use to Monsieur de Nucingen in such a case, by supporting his claim to the peerage ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... it has 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 head ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... man's age is the age in which he 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
... that squire—Miss 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 ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice |
