One of the best repartees ever made, because the briefest and the justest, was made by “the gorgeous Lady Blessington” to Napoleon III.  When Prince Louis Napoleon was living in impecunious exile in London he had been a constant guest at Lady Blessington’s hospitable and brilliant but Bohemian house.  And she, when visiting Paris after the coup d’etat naturally expected to receive at the Tuileries some return for the unbounded hospitalities of Gore House.  Weeks passed, no invitation arrived, and the Imperial Court took no notice of Lady Blessington’s presence.  At length she encountered the Emperor at a great reception.  As he passed through the bowing and curtsying crowd, the Emperor caught sight of his former hostess.  “Ah, Miladi Blessington!  Restez-vous longtemps a Paris?” “Et vous, Sire?” History does not record the usurper’s reply.

Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter from 1830 to 1869, lived at a beautiful villa near Torquay, and an enthusiastic lady who visited him there burst into dithyrambics and cried, “What a lovely spot this is, Bishop!  It is so Swiss.”  “Yes, ma’am,” blandly replied old Harry of Exeter, “it is very Swiss; only there is no sea in Switzerland, and there are no mountains here.”  To one of his clergy desiring to renew a lease of some episcopal property, the Bishop named a preposterous sum as the fine on renewal.  The poor parson, consenting with reluctance, said, “Well, I suppose it is better than endangering the lease, but certainly your lordship has got the lion’s share.”  “But, my dear sir, I am sure you would not wish me to have that of the other creature.”

Still, after all, for a bishop to score off a clergyman is an inglorious victory; it is like the triumph of a magistrate over a prisoner or of a don over an undergraduate.  Bishop Wilberforce, whose powers of repartee were among his most conspicuous gifts, was always ready to use them where retaliation was possible—­not in the safe enclosure of the episcopal study, but on the open battlefield of the platform and the House of Lords.  At the great meeting in St. James’s Hall in the summer of 1868 to protest against the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, some Orange enthusiast, in the hope of disturbing the Bishop, kept interrupting his honeyed eloquence with inopportune shouts of “Speak up, my lord.”  “I am already speaking up,” replied the Bishop in his most dulcet tone; “I always speak up; and I decline to speak down to the level of the ill-mannered person in the gallery.”  Every one whose memory runs back thirty years will recall the Homeric encounters between the Bishop and Lord Chancellor Westbury in the House of Lords, and will remember the melancholy circumstances under which Lord Westbury had to resign his office.  When he was leaving the Royal Closet after surrendering the Great Seal into the Queen’s hands, Lord Westbury met the Bishop, who was going in to the Queen.  It was a painful encounter, and in reminding the Bishop