that all godsends of this nature had ceased to occur, and that an
author might chatter his teeth to pieces by the seaside without a
wave ever wafting to him a casket containing such a history as that
of Automates; that he might break his shins in stumbling through
a hundred vaults without finding anything but rats and mice;
and become the tenant of a dozen sets of shabby tenements without
finding that they contained any manuscript but the weekly bill for
board and lodging. A dairymaid of these degenerate days might as
well wash and deck her dairy in hopes of finding the fairy tester
in her shoe.

"It is a sad and too true a tale, cousin," said Mrs. Baliol,
"I am sure we all have occasion to regret the want of these ready
supplements to a failing invention. But you, most of all, have right
to complain that the fairest have not favoured your researches--
you, who have shown the world that the age of chivalry still exists
--you, the knight of Croftangry, who braved the fury of the 'London
'prentice bold,' in behalf of the fair Dame Policy, and the memorial
of Rizzio's slaughter! Is it not a pity, cousin, considering the
feat of chivalry was otherwise so much according to rule--is it
not, I say, a great pity that the lady had not been a little younger,
and the legend a little older?"

"Why, as to the age at which a fair dame loses the benefit of
chivalry, and is no longer entitled to crave boon of brave knight,
that I leave to the statutes of the Order of Errantry; but for the
blood of Rizzio I take up the gauntlet, and maintain against all
and sundry that I hold the stains to be of no modern date, but to
have been actually the consequence and the record of that terrible
assassination."