BISHOP AND PORT.
My Dear Mr. Punch,
In my Autobiography, which I am glad and proud to say, has met with your cordial approbation, I have recorded how the late lamented Bishop, Dr. Sumner, said to me, "I have drunk a bottle of port wine every day since I was a boy." Well, his son, the Archdeacon, is annoyed at this statement. Now, my memory is a very good one, and if I am wrong in one point so circumstantially narrated, why not in several, why not in all? If the Bishop did not say this, to me, who did? Somebody said it, that I will swear. Who said it? If my memory fails me, is it not also likely that the Bishop's memory was not particularly good, and consequently, that he was mistaken in thinking that he had drunk a bottle a day since his boyhood? I have little doubt that the Bishop only imagined it, and perhaps he was joking. Perhaps he was playing on the words "bishop" and "port." "Bishop" was a hot drink, I fancy, made with port wine. I have no hesitation in comforting his Archidiaconal offspring by assuring him that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, his father, the Bishop, did not drink a bottle of port every day since his boyhood. He was a very fine old clergyman—I forget whether he was exactly portly or not, or whether he resided in Portman Square,—and I should say that first-rate port, such as the elixir vitæ that made a hale centenarian of Sir Moses Montefiore, taken frequently, would have tended to make him the genial prelate he was. Had he only gone into port once, that would not have sufficed to have produced such a Bishop, for "One swallow does not make a Sumner." Yours ever,W(ithdraw) P(ort) Frith.
P.S.—The Archdeacon is satisfied, and if he will only come round to see me and bring a bottle of the port the Bishop didn't drink, why, on my word as an artist, I'll draw the cork.
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