'Confess before the congregation? 'Faith, the discourse may be improving. Is the Elect Lady handsome?'
'She hath been one of the most renowned beauties of her age, and there are some who say that she is little altered by time. Ah, sir, she will make you embrace the truth.'
'My embraces were ever at the mercy of feminine persuasion,' said Wogan. 'Is this Elect Lady of these parts?'
'No, sir, she comes from the South, travelling with holy Mr. Bunton. You will oblige me infinitely, sir, if you will take pity on your own poor soul and join our love-feast. We meet in the warehouse of Mr. Brown, our most eminent grocer, in Scotch Lane, behind the "Jackdaw and Bagpipes."'
'I thank you for your solicitude,' Wogan said; 'and as to the love-feast, I'll think of it.'
Consequently he thought no more of it till the bottle had gone round half-a-dozen times at the Prince's mess in the 'Bull Tavern.' Lord Elcho, who had certainly drunk his dose, began telling, as a good thing, of his conversation with a bourgeois of Preston.
'"What is your Prince's religion?" asked the bourgeois.
'"That is still to seek, my good man, still to seek," I answered him,' cried Elcho, laughing.
The Prince laughed also; the free-thinking philosophers had been at him already, first in Rome, then in Paris.
'Good for you, Elcho,' he cried; then, musing, ''Tis a very awkward business, this of religion. We have given three crowns for a mass, and there's the difficulty, there it is, as black as ever. I wish some one would invent a new creed, and the rest agree about it, d----n them, and then what is still to seek, my religion, would be found.'