“No, sir; Edmund Spenser.”
Of course this is arrant nonsense on the face of it, but he won’t admit that he’s made pi of his story, and he goes on:
“Edmund said that Charles—”
“Dickens?”
“No, sir; Charles Reade. Edmund said that Charles Reade thought George—er—”
“Meredith?”
“No; hang it all! George Eliot. He thought that George Eliot never wrote a better book than ‘Silas’—er—”
“‘Marner’?”
“Not at all! ‘Silas Lapham.’”
Now, if you are merciful, or if you are refinedly cruel, either one, you will allow him to finish his story in peace, and, like as not, he will start all over again by saying: “I guess I inadvertently got hold of the wrong name at the beginning. It was not Dickens, as you said, but Thackeray. Thackeray was one day walking along the Bowery when he met a typical—” And so on to the bitter end.