Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Germany, Vol. 14: Present and Past
"There are but two families in the world, as my grandmother used to say: the Haves and the Havenots, and she always stuck to the former." - Don Quixote.
"Here Baron! Thank you," said a waiter to a traveller, on receiving payment of the hill.
"I am not a baron, mein lieber!" remarked the latter.
"Oh, sir! we call every one Baron who tips with a ha'penny," answered the Kellner, contemptuously pocketing the five-pfennig piece.
An Englishman is somewhat impatient to find barons abroad as thick as blackberries, and looking equally ragged. He is not a little amazed to find he has offended his tailor by not addressing him as "Well-born," and startled to hear that a daughter of one of our oldest and noblest families is not deemed well-born enough to mate with a lack-land German prince, whose ancestors a hundred and fifty years ago wore gentlemen about court, and nothing more. A tradesman is "well-born," but the daughter of an Anglo-Norman house, who marries the sixth son of Prince Potztausend, is doomed to bear her maiden name, and know that out of England the union is regarded as morganatic, and her children as illegitimate.
Germans, like Frenchmen, are quite incapable of understanding English aristocratic distinctions.
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