one's name? Oh, said the princess, but it shewed taste too. There was
a time when in Italy the learned carried this still farther; and a man
with a large forehead, who was born on the fifth of January, called
himself Quintus Januarius Fronto. More and more absurd, said the
emperor. You seem to have a great deal of impertinent knowledge about a
great many impertinent people; but proceed in your story: whence came
you? Mynheer, said she, I was born in Holland--The deuce you was, said
the emperor, and where is that? It was no where, replied the princess,
spritelily, till my countrymen gained it from the sea--Indeed, moppet!
said his majesty; and pray who were your countrymen, before you had any
country? Your majesty asks a vey shrewd question, said she, which I
cannot resolve on a sudden; but I will step home to my library, and
consult five or six thousand volumes of modern history, an hundred or
two dictionaries, and an abridgment of geography in forty volumes in
folio, and be back in an instant. Not so fast, my life, said the
emperor, you must not rise till you go to execution; it is now one in
the morning, and you have not begun your story.

My great grandfather, continued the princess, was a Dutch merchant, who
passed many years in Japan--On what account? said the emperor. He went
thither to abjure his religion, said she, that he might get money enough
to return and defend it against Philip 2d. You are a pleasant family,
said the emperor; but though I love fables, I hate genealogies. I know
in all families, by their own account, there never was any thing but
good and great men from father to son; a sort of fiction that does not
at all amuse me. In my dominions there is no nobility but flattery.
Whoever flatters me best is created a great lord, and the titles I
confer are synonimous to their merits. There is Kiss-my-breech-Can, my
favourite; Adulation-Can, lord treasurer; Prerogative-Can, head of the
law; and Blasphemy-Can, high-priest. Whoever speaks truth, corrupts his