This alluded to a story which was, as the French term it, Halcro’s cheval de bataille, and any allusion to which was certain at once to place him in the saddle, and to push his hobby-horse into full career.
His laughing eye kindled with a sort of enthusiasm, which the ordinary folk of this world might have called crazed, while he dashed into the subject which he best loved to talk upon. “Alas, alas, my dear Mordaunt Mertoun—silver is silver, and waxes not dim by use—and pewter is pewter, and grows the longer the duller. It is not for poor Claud Halcro to name himself in the same twelvemonth with the immortal John Dryden. True it is, as I may have told you before, that I have seen that great man, nay I have been in the Wits’ Coffeehouse, as it was then called, and had once a pinch out of h
