Ivanhoe

"By the bald scalp of Abraham," said Prince John, "yonder Jewess must be

the very model of that perfection, whose charms drove frantic the wisest

king that ever lived! What sayest thou, Prior Aymer?--By the Temple

of that wise king, which our wiser brother Richard proved unable to

recover, she is the very Bride of the Canticles!"

"The Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley,"--answered the Prior, in

a sort of snuffling tone; "but your Grace must remember she is still but

a Jewess."

"Ay!" added Prince John, without heeding him, "and there is my Mammon

of unrighteousness too--the Marquis of Marks, the Baron of Byzants,

contesting for place with penniless dogs, whose threadbare cloaks have

not a single cross in their pouches to keep the devil from dancing

there. By the body of St Mark, my prince of supplies, with his lovely

Jewess, shall have a place in the gallery!--What is she, Isaac? Thy wife

or thy daughter, that Eastern houri that thou lockest under thy arm as

thou wouldst thy treasure-casket?"

"My daughter Rebecca, so please your Grace," answered Isaac, with a

low congee, nothing embarrassed by the Prince's salutation, in which,

however, there was at least as much mockery as courtesy.

"The wiser man thou," said John, with a peal of laughter, in which his

gay followers obsequiously joined. "But, daughter or wife, she should

be preferred according to her beauty and thy merits.--Who sits above

there?" he continued, bending his eye on the gallery. "Saxon churls,

lolling at their lazy length!--out upon them!--let them sit close, and

make room for my prince of usurers and his lovely daughter. I'll make

the hinds know they must share the high places of the synagogue with

those whom the synagogue properly belongs to."

Those who occupied the gallery to whom this injurious and unpolite

speech was addressed, were the family of Cedric the Saxon, with that of

his ally and kinsman, Athelstane of Coningsburgh, a personage, who, on

account of his descent from the last Saxon monarchs of England, was held

in the highest respect by all the Saxon natives of the north of England.

But with the blood of this ancient royal race, many of their infirmities

had descended to Athelstane. He was comely in countenance, bulky

and strong in person, and in the flower of his age--yet inanimate in

expression, dull-eyed, heavy-browed, inactive and sluggish in all his

motions, and so slow in resolution, that the soubriquet of one of his

ancestors was conferred upon him, and he was very generally called

Athelstane the Unready. His friends, and he had many, who, as well as

Cedric, were passionately attached to him, contended that this sluggish

temper arose not from want of courage, but from mere want of decision;

others alleged that his hereditary vice of drunkenness had obscured his

faculties, never of a very acute order, and that the passive courage

and meek good-nature which remained behind, were merely the dregs of a

character that might have been deserving of praise, but of which all the

valuable parts had flown off in the progress of a long course of brutal

debauchery.