'You must excuse
me, sir,' I remember his once saying to such a one, 'but what are you
doing with cigarette and salutaris? If I held such a belief as yours, I
would stand sandalled, with a rope round my waist, before to-morrow.'
One quaint instance of this earnest attitude in all things occurs to me
out of his schooldays. He was a Divine Right man, a fiery Jacobite, in
those days; and, probably not without some absurd unconfessed dream in
his heart that it might somehow help the dead old cause, he one
afternoon fluttered the Hanoverian hearts--all the men we meet in street
and mart are Hanoverians, of course--of our little literary club by
solemnly rising 'to give notice' that at the following meeting he would
read a paper to prove that 'the House of Hanover has no right to the
English throne.' Great was the excitement through the fortnight
intervening, extending even to the masters; and the meeting was a full
one, and no little stormy.
Narcissus rose with the air of a condemned Strafford, and with all his
boyish armoury of eloquence and scorn fought over again the long-lost
battle, hiss and groan falling unheeded into the stream of his young
voice. But vain, vain! hard is the Hanoverian heart in boy, as in man,
and all your glowing periods were in vain--vain as, your peroration told
us, 'was the blood of gallant hearts shed on Culloden's field.' Poor N.,
you had but one timorous supporter, even me, so early your _fidus
Achates_--but one against so many.
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