have seen that the context completely altered the sense. He would prove
it to the House, he said, and forthwith rolled forth a grand string of
majestic gibberish so well imitated that the whole assembly cried,
'Hear, hear!' Lord Belgrave rose again, and frankly admitted that the
passage had the meaning ascribed to it by the honourable gentleman, and
that he had overlooked it at the moment. At the end of the evening, Fox,
who prided himself on his classical lore, came up to and said to him,
'Sheridan, how came you to be so ready with that passage? It is
certainly as you say, but I was not aware of it before you quoted it.'
Sheridan was wise enough to keep his own counsel for the time, but must
have felt delightfully tickled at the ignorance of the would-be savants
with whom he was politically associated. Probably Sheridan could not at
any time have quoted a whole passage of Greek on the spur of the moment;
but it is certain that he had not kept up his classics, and at the time
in question must have forgotten the little he ever knew of them.

This facility of imitating exactly the sound of a language without
introducing a single word of it is not so very rare, but is generally
possessed in greater readiness by those who know no tongue but their
own, and are therefore more struck by the strangeness of a foreign one,
when hearing it. Many of us have heard Italian songs in which there was
not a word of actual Italian sung in London burlesques, and some of us
have laughed at Levassor's capital imitation of English; but perhaps the
cleverest mimic of the kind I ever heard was M. Laffitte, brother of
that famous banker who made his fortune by picking up a pin. This
gentleman could speak nothing but French, but had been brought by his
business into contact with foreigners of every race at Paris, and when
he once began his little trick, it was impossible to believe that he was
not possessed of a gift of tongues. His German and Italian were good
enough, but his English was so splendidly counterfeited, that after