or that

"Lord Alington comes of a family of ancient lineage, one of his ancestors being Sir Hildebrand de Alington, who was marshal to William the Conqueror at the battle of Hastings,"

though we may know full well that the Sturt pedigree really begins in the seventeenth century, and that the earliest known Heneage lived and died some three centuries before.

But "noble" families have no monopoly of misguided genealogy. "The immense majority of the pedigrees of the landed gentry," says a well-known officer of arms, "cannot, I fear, be characterised as otherwise than utterly worthless. The errors of the 'peerage' are as nothing to the fables which we encounter everywhere;" and the same may be said of many another collection of pedigrees which is a treasured possession in countless British homes.

Some even justly famous men have not been proof against this insidious form of vanity and pretence. Edmund Spenser was ungenerous enough to "dismiss his known ancestry of small Lancashire gentry and plant himself modestly in the shadow of the newly discovered shield of arms of the noble house of Spencer, 'of which I meanest boast myself to be.'" And Lord Tennyson, whose ultimate ascertainable forefather was an eighteenth century Lincolnshire apothecary, was provided with a slightly differenced cadet's version of the arms of Archbishop Tenison, with whom he had no connection whatever.

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