lose our manly spirit, and we cling to that,--till we lose our princely
spirit, which we never will abandon--perish rather!--I drink to you, and
challenge you; and, mind you, old Hock wine has charms. If Burgundy is
the emperor of wines, Hock is the empress. For youngsters, perhaps, I
should except the Hock that gets what they would fancy a trifle pique,
turned with age, so as to lose in their opinion its empress flavour.'

Temple said modestly: 'I should call that the margravine of wines.'

My father beamed on him with great approving splendour. 'Join us, Mr.
Temple; you are a man of wit, and may possibly find this specimen worthy
of you. This wine has a history. You are drinking wine with blood in
it. Well, I was saying, the darling of my heart has been torn from me; I
am in a foreign land; foreign, that is, by birth, and on the whole
foreign. Yes!--I am the cynosure of eyes; I am in a singular posture, a
singular situation; I hear a cry in the tongue of my native land, and
what I presume is my boy's name: I look, I behold him, I follow a
parent's impulse. On my soul! none but a fish-father could have stood
against it.

Well, for this my reward is--and I should have stepped from a cathedral
spire just the same, if I had been mounted on it--that I, I,--and the
woman knows all my secret--I have to submit to the foul tirade of a
vixen.

She drew language, I protest, from the slums. And I entreat you, Mr.
Temple, with your "margravine of wines"--which was very neatly said, to
be sure--note you this curious point for the confusion of Radicals in
your after life; her Highness's pleasure was to lend her tongue to the
language--or something like it--of a besotted fish-wife; so! very well,