To you my Lady, who may imagine that Miss Bacon was not of a good family, (Lord Verulam's line, as you very properly remark, being extinct,) I beg leave to observe that she was certainly a cousin of your own; somewhere within the tenth and twentieth degrees, if not nearer. And this I proceed to prove.
Every person has two immediate parents, four ancestors in the second degree, eight in the third, and so the pedigree ascends, doubling at every step, till in the twentieth generation, he has no fewer than one million, thirty thousand, eight hundred and ninety-six
Great, great, great,
great, great, great,
great, great, great,
great, great, great,
great, great, great,
great, great, great,
grandfathers and grandmothers. Therefore my Lady, I conceive it to be absolutely certain, that under the Plantagenets, if not in the time of the Tudors, some of your ancestors must have been equally ancestors of Miss Deborah Bacon.
“At the conquest,” says Sir Richard Phillips, “the ancestry of every one of the English people was the whole population of England; while on the other hand, every one having children at that time, was the direct progenitor of the whole of the living race.”
The reflecting reader sees at once that it must be so. Plato ait, Neminem regem non ex servis esse oriendum, neminem non servum ex regibus. Omnia ista longa varietas miscuit, et sursum deorsum fortuna versavit. Quis ergo generosus? ad virtutem bene à natura compositus. Hoc unum est intuendum: alioqui, si ad vetera revocas, nemo non inde est, ante quod nihil1 est. And the erudite Ihre in the Proemium to his invaluable Glossary, says, ut aliquoto cognationis gradu, sed per monumentorum defectum hodie inexplicabile, omnes homines inter se connexi sunt.
1 SENECA.
Now then to the gentle reader. The reason why I do not wear a cap and bells is this.
There are male caps of five kinds which are worn at present in this kingdom; to wit, the military cap, the collegiate cap, the jockey cap, the travelling cap, and the night cap. Observe reader, I said kinds, that is to say in scientific language genera,—for the species and varieties are numerous, especially in the former genus.
I am not a soldier; and having long been weaned from Alma Mater, of course have left off my college cap. The gentlemen of the ——— hunt would object to my going out with the bells on, it would be likely to frighten their horses; and were I to attempt it, it might involve me in unpleasant disputes, which might possibly lead to more unpleasant consequences. To my travelling cap the bells would be an inconvenient appendage; nor would they be a whit more comfortable upon my night-cap. Besides, my wife might object to them.