It was then that Mr. Fox got calmly up before the pack of frightened mercenaries and argued (God save the mark!) for moderation.  He had the ear of the house in a second, and he spoke with all the confidence—­this youngster who had just reached his majority—­he had used with me before his intimates.  I gaped with astonishment and admiration.  The Lords, said he, had plainly meant no insult to this honourable house, nor yet to the honourable members.  They had aimed at the common enemies of man, the printers.  And for this their heat was more than pardonable.  My friend at my side stopped his writing to swear under his breath.  “Look at ’em!” he cried; “they are turning already.  He could argue Swedenborg into popery!”

The deserters were coming back to the ranks, indeed, and North and Dyson and Weymouth had ceased to look haggard, and were wreathed in smiles.  In vain did Mr. Burke harangue them in polished phrase.  It was a language North and Company did not understand, and cared not to learn.  Their young champion spoke the more worldly and cynical tongue of White’s and Brooks’s, with its shorter sentences and absence of formality.  And even as the devil can quote Scripture to his purpose, Mr. Fox quoted history and the classics, with plenty more that was not above the heads of the booted and spurred country squires.  And thus, for the third time, he earned the gratitude of his gracious Majesty.

“Well, Richard,” said he, slipping his arm through mine as we came out into Parliament Street, “I promised you some sport.  Have you enjoyed it?”

I was forced to admit that I had.

“Let us to the ‘Thatched House,’ and have supper privately,” he suggested.  “I do not feel like a company to-night.”  We walked on for some time in silence.  Presently he said: 

“You must not leave us, Richard.  You may go home to see your grandfather die, and when you come back I will see about getting you a little borough for what my father paid for mine.  And you shall marry Dorothy, and perchance return in ten years as governor of a principality.  That is, after we’ve ruined you at the club.  How does that prospect sit?”

I wondered at the mood he was in, that made him choose me rather than the adulation and applause he was sure to receive at Brooks’s for the part he had played that night.  After we had satisfied our hunger,—­for neither of us had dined,—­and poured out a bottle of claret, he looked up at me quizzically.

“I have not heard you congratulate me,” he said.

“Nor will you,” I replied, laughing.

“I like you the better for it, Richard.  ’Twas a damned poor performance, and that’s truth.”

“I thought the performance remarkable,” I said honestly.

“Oh, but it was not,” he answered scornfully.  “The moment that dun-coloured Irishman gets up, the whole government pack begins to whine and shiver.  There are men I went to school with I fear more than Burke.  But you don’t like to see the champion of America come off second best.  Is that what you’re thinking?”