Page:Self-help with illustrations of conduct and perseverance (IA selfhelpwithillu00smiliala).pdf/279

Chesterfield did when he wrote, "ADAM de Stanhope—EVE de Stanhope." No class is ever long stationary. The mighty fall, and the humble are exalted. New families take the place of the old, who disappear among the ranks of the common people. Burke's 'Vicissitudes of Families' strikingly exhibits this rise and fall of families, and shows that the misfortunes which overtake the rich and noble are greater in proportion than those which overwhelm the poor. This author points out that of the twenty-five barons selected to enforce the observance of Magna Charta, there is not now in the House of Peers a single male descendant. Civil wars and rebellions ruined many of the old nobility and dispersed their families. Yet their descendants in many cases survive, and are to be found among the ranks of the people. Fuller wrote in his 'Worthies,' that "some who justly hold the surnames of Bohuns, Mortimers, and Plantagenets, are hid in the heap of common men." Thus Burke shows that two of the lineal descendants of the Earl of Kent, sixth son of Edward I., were discovered in a butcher and a toll-gatherer; that the great grandson of Margaret Plantagenet, daughter of the Duke of Clarence, sank to the condition of a cobbler at Newport, in Shropshire; and that among the lineal descendants of the Duke of Gloucester, son of Edward III., was the late sexton of St. George's, Hanover Square. It is understood that the lineal descendant of Simon de Montfort, England's premier baron, is a saddler in Tooley Street. One of the descendants of the "Proud Percys," a claimant of the title of Duke of Northumberland, was a Dublin trunk-maker; and not many years since one of the claimants for the title