Chief among my favourites was a madcap young member, whose wit was never so impertinent as when, flitting here and there for an opportunity, it could prick the sides of some great parliamentary bull, and elicit a roar for its pains. He was that Mr. Roper who, indeed, went so far, on somebody’s instigation, as to tease the great Mr. Pitt himself on certain measures introduced for the betterment of the Roman Catholics, and who, in consequence, redeemed himself a little, it was whispered, in the eyes of high personages with whom he had long been in disgrace. His father was Robert Lord Beltower, that deplorable old nobleman who was reported early in life to have staked his honour on some trifling issue, and lost; and who always described himself as living a posthumous life, since he had been carried off by a petticoat in the fifteenth year of his age. Father and second son (the heir to the title, Lord Roper of Loftus, was eminently respectable and pious) were known as Bob Major and Bob Minor; and, indeed, apart or together, could ring the changes on some very pretty tunes. But the minor, who had been a scapegrace page at court and early dismissed, was my enfant gâté, as well for his wit and information as for a daring that recked nothing of the deuce itself. He owned to no party, and as to his principles, “Why,” said he, “I throw up my hat to the best shot, and that isn’t always to the heavenly marksman. I have known the devil score some points in charity.”
He never truckled to me, which was perhaps one of the reasons of my favour; but was like a licensed brother—a relationship I had come to regard. Indeed, he most offended me by his outrageous independence of my partialities.
“Hey! Come, rogue, rogue!” sniggered his father to him once, on the occasion of some abominable impertinence; “you go too far. What the devil means this disrespect to our goddess? You’ll be pricked, egad, one of these days, like that fellow Atlas, or Actæon, or what the devil was his name, that was tore for his impudence.”
The son bowed to the sire, quoting Slender’s words to Shallow: “‘I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in the beginning, yet Heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance, when we are married and have more occasion to know one another: I hope, upon familiarity will grow more contempt; but if you say “Marry her,” I will marry her, that I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely.’”
“Why, you villain,” said his lordship, with a grin, “if you’re the devil quoting Scripture, I’m done with you.”
“Nay, sir,” said the other, “you flatter yourself. I quote no better than my father.”
“No better, you dog! And how?”
“Why, sir, wasn’t it you taught me that the more one sees of a woman the less one respects her?”
“I?”
“’Twas à propos the Chudleigh, sir, you may remember, whom you met at Ranelagh—in ’49, I think it was—undressed as Iphigenia. She came clothed in little but her virtue, and caught a bad cold a-consequence. You may have forgot the moral of your sermon, sir, but I, as a dutiful son, have stored it.”