“Take a glass of wine, Sir Arthur, and drink down that bead-roll of unbaptized jargon, that would choke the devil--why, that last fellow has the only intelligible name you have repeated--they are all of the tribe of Macfungus--mushroom monarchs every one of them; sprung up from the fumes of conceit, folly, and falsehood, fermenting in the brains of some mad Highland seannachie.” “I am surprised to hear you, Mr. Oldbuck: you know, or ought to know, that the list of these potentates was copied by Henry Maule of Melguin, from the Chronicles of Loch Leven and St. Andrews, and put forth by him in his short but satisfactory history of the Picts, printed by Robert Freebairn of Edinburgh, and sold by him at his shop in the Parliament Close, in the year of God seventeen hundred and five, or six, I am not precisely certain which--but I have a copy at home that stands next to my twelvemo copy of the Scots Acts, and ranges on the shelf with them very well. What say you to that, Mr. Oldbuck?” “Say?--why, I laugh at Harry Maule and his history,” answered Oldbuck, “and thereby comply with his request, of giving it entertainment according to its merits.” “Do not laugh at a better man than yourself,” said Sir Arthur, somewhat scornfully. “I do not conceive I do, Sir Arthur, in laughing either at him or his history.” “Henry Maule of Melgum was a gentleman, Mr. Oldbuck.” “I presume he had no advantage of me in that particular,” replied the Antiquary, somewhat tartly. “Permit me, Mr. Oldbuck--he was a gentleman of high family, and ancient descent, and therefore”-- “The descendant of a Westphalian printer should speak of him with deference? Such may be your opinion, Sir Arthur--it is not mine. I conceive that my descent from that painful and industrious typographer, Wolfbrand Oldenbuck, who, in the month of December 1493, under the patronage, as the colophon tells us, of Sebaldus Scheyter and Sebastian Kammermaister, accomplished the printing of the great Chronicle of Nuremberg--I conceive, I say, that my descent from that great restorer of learning is more creditable to me as a man of letters, than if I had numbered in my genealogy all the brawling, bullet-headed, iron-fisted, old Gothic barons since the days of Crentheminachcryme--not one of whom, I suppose, could write his own name.” “If you mean the observation as a sneer at my ancestry,” said the knight, with an assumption of dignified superiority and composure, “I have the pleasure to inform you, that the name of my ancestor, Gamelyn de Guardover, Miles, is written fairly with his own hand in the earliest copy of the Ragman-roll.” “Which only serves to show that he was one of the earliest who set the mean example of submitting to Edward I. What have, you to say for the stainless loyalty of your family, Sir Arthur, after such a backsliding as that?”