A translator as a rule has no right to interfere with the text of the Author. I hope, however, that I may be excused for having ventured to correct some manifest slips which M. Hugo has made in preparing for Ursus the description of the rights and privileges of the English peerage. I have not, indeed, corrected all mistakes. Thus, for example, in the very first sentences of this passage about the peerage, it is stated that the baron wears only a cap, and that the viscount is the lowest rank of peer entitled to a coronet. This was true up to the end of Charles the Second’s reign. It is not true now, and it was not true at the time when Ursus wrote. Yet it was a statement which he might reasonably have supposed to be true, and therefore I have let it remain. I have even ventured to pass anachronisms of the opposite kind-where Ursus speaks of that as existing which had not yet come to pass. Thus there will be found among his list of great peers, at the period of the Revolution, some titles, as those of Lords Grantham, Lonsdale, Scarborough, Kent, and Coningsby, which were not created till afterward-when the century was at its close, or even when the next century had commenced. These are errors of detail which do not interfere with the general truth of the picture. With other statements, which never were at any time true, I have been less tender. Thus I have struck out the statement that, on the top of Devonshire House, there was a lion which turned its tail on the king’s palace. Again, where the writer states that daily in the king’s palace there were eighty-six tables spread, each with five hundred dishes-I have ventured to give the true statement that there were five hundred dishes in all. And so with some other details. With a few passages I have had a little difficulty in deciding how to deal. Thus Victor Hugo makes his hero write-“Toute fille de lord est lady. Les autres fines anglaises sont miss.” With regard to the first of these statements it is well known that every daughter of a peer does not bear the title of lady; it is only the daughters of a duke, a marquis, or an earl, who are so honoured. Still, in the general obfuscation of intellect which titular niceties are apt to produce, Ursus might be supposed likely to designate as lady every peer’s daughter whomsoever. On the other hand, the daughters of commoners were not called miss in those days, and I have made bold to give the title which Ursus must have known. Let me add that most of the details as to THE ONLY THINGS NECESSARY TO KNOW are borrowed from Chamberlayne’s well-known work, “The Present State of England,” and that I am a little surprised at the omission by M. Victor Hugo and his hero Ursus of one curious touch which will be found in Chamberlayne’s chapter on the peerage-“No viscount is to wash with a marquis, but at his pleasure.”-TRANSLATOR.