His Grace — page 162: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

156 HIS GRACE. describe at full length a ceremony of which most of them must have only too often witnessed the parallel. It was a ceremony like other such ceremonies, and it was marred by no hitch, unless you could count as such Hurstbourne’s unintentional ascription of an apothegm to Marcus Aurelius, which should by rights have been placed to the credit of a later wearer of the purple. After all, it was near enough for all practical purposes, and I don’t doubt that, when I subsequently took the liberty of pointing out his slip to him, he was amply justified in retorting that nobody knew the dif- ference between one of those old buffers and another. Having discharged our duties to the public satisfac- tion, we were entertained at a truly magnificent lunch- eon by the Mayor; after which somebody presented Lady Charles with a bouquet, and there was, as a matter of course, more speechifying. I had not coached Hurstbourne for a second oration, so that he used his own words, and achieved a success far greater than I could have secured for him with my carefully rounded periods. He was not very discreet. He dragged in politics, which he ought not to have done; he had something to say about the preservation of foxes, which was not altogether appropriate to the occasion, and his style was almost too colloquial to be reported verbatim in the local newspapers ; but he won the sympathy of his hearers, who cheered him to the echo. “ His Grace,’’ Lady Charles remarked to me, as we rose from the table, ‘ thoroughly understands the art of dealing with his inferiors.” She added—in case my mother-wit should not have enabled me to discover as much—that that was a most important art to have mastered in these democratic days. Eomichoo m