Page:Walter Scott - The Monastery (Henry Frowde, 1912).djvu/213

RV 145 (Rh) game than that of courtly gallants in a galliard, so I hold it ineffably and unutterably impossible that those who may succeed us in that garden of wit and courtesy shall alter or amend it. Venus delighted but in the language of Mercury, Bucephalus will stoop to no one but Alexander, none can sound Apollo's pipe but Orpheus.'

'Valiant sir,' said Mary, who could scarcely help laughing, 'we have but to rejoice in the chance which hath honoured this solitude with a glimpse of the sun of courtesy, though it rather blinds than enlightens us.'

'Pretty and quaint, fairest lady,' answered the Euphuist. 'Ah, that I had with me my Anatomy of Wit—that all-to-be-unparalleled



volume—that quintessence of human wit—that treasury of quaint invention—that exquisitively-pleasant-to-read, and inevitably-necessary-to-be-remembered manual, of all that is worthy to be known—which indoctrines the rude in civility, the dull in intellectuality, the heavy in jocosity, the blunt in gentility, the vulgar in nobility, and all of them in that unutterable perfection of human utterance, that eloquence which no other eloquence is sufficient to praise, that art which, when we call it by its own name of Euphuism, we bestow on it its richest panegyric.'

'By Saint Mary,' said Christie of the Clinthill, 'if your worship had told me that you had left such stores of wealth