He remained silent during the earlier part of _Schéhérazade_ until Karsavina, as the favourite of the Sultan’s harem, persuaded the Chief Eunuch to release her orange-tawny favourite, Monsieur Massine, at which the knight exclaimed, “On my word, a notable young baggage!” I refrained from telling my innocent friend that in the old Arabian tale these tawny creatures were apes. He mightily liked the Sultan’s long beard. “When I am walking in my gallery in the country,” says he, “and see the beards of my ancestors, I cannot forbear regarding them as so many old patriarchs, and myself as an idle smock-faced young fellow. I love to see your Abrahams and Isaacs, as we have them in old pieces of tapestry with beards below their girdles. I suppose this fellow, with all these wives, must be Solomon.” And, his thoughts running upon that King, he said he kept his Book of Wisdom by his bedside in the country and found it, though Apocryphal, more conducive to virtue than the writings of Monsieur La Rochefoucauld or, indeed, of Socrates himself, whose life he had read at the end of the Dictionary. Captain Sentry, seeing two or three wags who sat near us lean with an attentive ear towards Sir Roger, and fearing lest they should smoak the knight, plucked him by the elbow, and whispered something in his ear that lasted until the Sultan returned to the harem and put the ladies and their tawny companions to the sword. The favourite’s plunging the dagger into her heart moved him to tears, but he dried them hastily on bethinking him she was a Mahometan, and asked of us, on our way home, whether there was no playhouse in London where they danced true Church of England pantomimes. PARTRIDGE AT “JULIUS CÆSAR” Mr. Jones having spent three hours in reading and kissing Sophia’s letter, and being at last in a state of good spirits, he agreed to carry an appointment, which he had before made, into execution. This was, to attend Mrs. Miller and her youngest daughter into the gallery at the St. James’s playhouse, and to admit Mr. Partridge as one of the company. For, as Jones had really that taste for humour which many affect, he expected to enjoy much entertainment in the criticisms of Partridge; from whom he expected the simple dictates of nature, unimproved, indeed, but likewise unadulterated by art. In the first row, then, of the first gallery did Mr. Jones, Mrs. Miller, her youngest daughter, and Partridge take their places. Partridge immediately declared it was the finest place he had ever been in. When the first music was played he said it was a wonder how so many fiddlers could play at one time without putting one another out.