Johnson," Pope, Macaulay, Stuart Mill, Huxley, Darwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burke, Disraeli, Cowper, Sir William Blackstone, and nearly all of the Chief Justices of England. These are but a few of the great names that shine along the ranks of England's middle classes.

Many of these men were called to the foot of the throne by a grateful sovereign to receive some distinction,—so paltry by comparison with glory of their own earning,—and among them came one day an ancestor of the mother of George Washington. Who he was we know not, nor yet what had been his service to his country; but he was deemed worthy to bear upon his shield a lion rampant, the most honorable emblem of heraldry, and the lion's paws held aloft a ball! This much we know of him,—that in addition to his valor and fidelity he possessed a poet's soul. He chose for the motto, the cri de guerre of his clan, a suggestive phrase from these lines of Ovid:—

"He gave to man a noble countenance and commanded him to gaze upon the heavens, and to carry his looks upward to the stars."