Squire Headlong. Good.  Pass the bottle. (Un morne silence).  Sir Christopher does not seem to have raised our spirits.  Chromatic, favour us with a specimen of your vocal powers.  Something in point.

Mr Chromatic, without further preface, immediately struck up the following

        SONG

    In his last binn Sir Peter lies,
      Who knew not what it was to frown: 
    Death took him mellow, by surprise,
      And in his cellar stopped him down. 
    Through all our land we could not boast
      A knight more gay, more prompt than he,
    To rise and fill a bumper toast,
      And pass it round with THREE TIMES THREE.

    None better knew the feast to sway,
      Or keep Mirth’s boat in better trim;
    For Nature had but little clay
      Like that of which she moulded him. 
    The meanest guest that graced his board
      Was there the freest of the free,
    His bumper toast when Peter poured,
      And passed it round with THREE TIMES THREE.

    He kept at true good humour’s mark
      The social flow of pleasure’s tide: 
    He never made a brow look dark,
      Nor caused a tear, but when he died. 
    No sorrow round his tomb should dwell: 
      More pleased his gay old ghost would be,
    For funeral song, and passing bell,
      To hear no sound but THREE TIMES THREE.

(Hammering of knuckles and glasses and shouts of bravo!)

Mr Panscope. (Suddenly emerging from a deep reverie.) I have heard, with the most profound attention, every thing which the gentleman on the other side of the table has thought proper to advance on the subject of human deterioration; and I must take the liberty to remark, that it augurs a very considerable degree of presumption in any individual, to set himself up against the authority of so many great men, as may be marshalled in metaphysical phalanx under the opposite banners of the controversy; such as Aristotle, Plato, the scholiast on Aristophanes, St Chrysostom, St Jerome, St Athanasius, Orpheus, Pindar, Simonides, Gronovius, Hemsterhusius, Longinus, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine, Doctor Paley, the King of Prussia, the King of Poland, Cicero, Monsieur Gautier, Hippocrates, Machiavelli, Milton, Colley Cibber, Bojardo, Gregory Nazianzenus, Locke, D’Alembert, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Erasmus, Doctor Smollett, Zimmermann, Solomon, Confucius, Zoroaster, and Thomas-a-Kempis.

Mr Escot. I presume, sir, you are one of those who value an authority more than a reason.

Mr Panscope. The authority, sir, of all these great men, whose works, as well as the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the entire series of the Monthly Review, the complete set of the Variorum Classics, and the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions, I have read through from beginning to end, deposes, with irrefragable refutation, against your ratiocinative speculations, wherein you seem desirous, by the futile process of analytical dialectics, to subvert the pyramidal structure of synthetically deduced opinions, which have withstood the secular revolutions of physiological disquisition, and which I maintain to be transcendentally self-evident, categorically certain, and syllogistically demonstrable.