“How, Mr. Author, was that?”
“I dealt with it, Sir, as Agesilaus unceremoniously did with one victim upon the altar of Chalciœcious Pallas, at the same time that with all due ceremony he was sacrificing another. An ox was the premeditated and customary victim; the extemporaneous and extraordinary one was a six-footed ‘small deer.’ Plutarch thought the fact worthy of being recorded; and we may infer from it that the Spartans did not always comb their long hair so carefully as the Three Hundred did at Thermopylæ, when on the morning of that ever glorious fight, they made themselves ready to die there in obedience to the institutions of their country. What the King of Lacedæmon did with his crawler, I did with my skipper;—I cracked it, Sir.”
“And for what imaginable reason can you have thought fit to publish such an incident to the world?”
“For what reason, Sir?—why, that Hop-o'-my-thumb the critic may know what he has to expect, if I lay hold of him!”
CHAPTER LXXXIX.
A CHAPTER CHARACTERISTIC OF FRENCH ANTIQUARIES, FRENCH LADIES, FRENCH LAWYERS, FRENCH JUDGES, FRENCH LITERATURE, AND FRENCHNESS IN GENERAL.
Quid de pulicibus? vitæ salientia puncta.
COWLEY.