"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.