She thought my father only moderately unwell, wanting novelty.  Captain Bulsted agreed with me that it would be prudent to go and fetch him.  At the door of the City hall stood Andrew Saddlebank, grown to be simply a larger edition of Rippenger’s head boy, and he imparted to us that my father was ‘on his legs’ delivering a speech:  It alarmed me.  With Saddlebank’s assistance I pushed in.

‘A prince! a treacherous lover! an unfatherly man!’

Those were the words I caught:  a reproduction of many of my phrases employed in our arguments on this very subject.

He bade his audience to beware of princes, beware of idle princes; and letting his florid fancy loose on these eminent persons, they were at one moment silver lamps, at another poising hawks, and again sprawling pumpkins; anything except useful citizens.  How could they be?  They had the attraction of the lamp, the appetite of the hawk, the occupation of the pumpkin:  nothing was given them to do but to shine, destroy, and fatten.  Their hands were kept empty:  a trifle in their heads would topple them over; they were monuments of the English system of compromise.  Happy for mankind if they were monuments only!  Happy for them!  But they had the passions of men.  The adulation of the multitude was raised to inflate them, whose self-respect had not one prop to rest an, unless it were contempt for the flatterers and prophetic foresight of their perfidy.  They were the monuments of a compromise between the past and terror of the future; puppets as princes, mannikins as men, the snares of frail women, stop-gaps of the State, feathered nonentities!

So far (but not in epigram) he marshalled the things he had heard to his sound of drum and trumpet, like one repeating a lesson off-hand.  Steering on a sudden completely round, he gave his audience an outline of the changes he would have effected had he but triumphed in his cause; and now came the lashing of arms, a flood of eloquence.  Princes with brains, princes leaders, princes flowers of the land, he had offered them! princes that should sway assemblies, and not stultify the precepts of a decent people ’by making you pay in the outrage of your morals for what you seem to gain in policy.’  These or similar words.  The whole scene was too grotesque and afflicting.  But his command of his hearers was extraordinary, partly a consolation I thought, until, having touched the arm of one of the gentlemen of the banquet and said, ’I am his son; I wish to remove him,’ the reply enlightened me:  ’I ’m afraid there’s danger in interrupting him; I really am.’

They were listening obediently to one whom they dared not interrupt for fear of provoking an outburst of madness.