Amo, amas, I love a lass, And she’s both tall and slender: In the nominative case, with a cowslip’s grace, And she’s in the feminine gender. That rant brought down a round of applause, while the gentle charm of the ‘Lass of Richmond Hill’ fell flat. There was a little of the freedom of manner which Fan had indicated at the close of the meal, either because the serious business of the day being well over, there was a reactionary tendency to frolicking, or for the alarming reason that old Dadd’s champagne had proved exceptionally heady and had taken extraordinary effect on heads not accustomed to the potation. ’Mily Polley had kept the ‘merry thought’ of her wing of a fowl to pull with Jack Dadd, and when she failed to secure the longer half of the bone, she was so left to herself as to toss her share into Jack’s waistcoat. Jack was still farther left to himself, though it was only a rose which he plucked from his button-hole and aimed at her ducked head. However, the precedent was ominous and the selection of missiles might not have continued so judicious. Fortunately Mr. Holland succeeded in establishing a humorous clerical veto. ‘Come, come, you young people,’ he protested affably, ‘you must not take to throwing about things. It ain’t safe. How do you know but you might catch me in the eye? It would be a pretty job if I had to appear with a black eye in your chapel pulpit on Sunday. I ain’t sure, though all my deacons are here, that I should escape censure.’ ‘Hang it,’ muttered the dissentient voice of Jack Dadd amidst the clamorous approval of the joke, ‘what though we bunged up both his eyes, if he means to sit upon us now. We ain’t priest-ridden Pussyites.’ In reality Jack cherished no evil feeling towards his pastor, only the young fellow looked upon it as manly and swellish to express a certain amount of defiance of clergymen and contempt for their order. He liked to shock those of his fair companions who regarded sacerdotal pretensions more respectfully, but who had no objections to being shocked into crying out at such a culprit as Jack Dadd. Oliver valiantly fought against pronouncing a judgment on the little interlude, by comparing it in his own mind to what Horace Walpole has described of a scrimmage he witnessed in a box at Vauxhall or Ranelagh between the members of Lady Petersham’s party, after supper. Only a hundred years ago such incidents occurred in public among the leaders of the great world, and, at the worst, ’Mily Polley was a thousand times less objectionable than the disreputable fine-lady, and Jack Dadd than her drunken profligate squires. Oliver would certainly point out to Fan the analogy between the scenes, emphasising the fact that a certain Bohemian picturesqueness—and blackguardism belonging to the first, were lacking in the second.