hat's no good. Gibraltar can
never be taken."

In 1872, when University College, Oxford, celebrated the thousandth
anniversary of its foundation, Lord Sherbrooke, as an old Member of the
College, made the speech of the evening. His theme was a complaint of
the iconoclastic tendency of New Historians. Nothing was safe from their
sacrilegious research. Every tradition, however venerable, however
precious, was resolved into a myth or a fable. "For example," he said,
"we have always believed that certain lands which this college owns in
Berkshire were given to us by King Alfred. Now the New Historians come
and tell us that this could not have been the case, because they can
prove that the lands in question never belonged to the King. It seems to
me that the New Historians prove too much--indeed, they prove the very
point which they contest. If the lands had belonged to the King, he
would probably have kept them to himself; but as they belonged to some
one else, he made a handsome present of them to the College."

Lord Beaconsfield's excellence in conversation lay rather in studied
epigrams than in impromptu repartees. But in his old electioneering
contests he used sometimes to make very happy hits. When he came
forward, a young, penniless, unknown coxcomb, to contest High Wycombe
against the dominating Whiggery of the Greys and the Carringtons, some
one in the crowd shouted, "We know all about Colonel Grey; but pray what
do you stand on?" "I stand on my head," was the prompt reply, to which
Mr. Gladstone always rendered unstinted admiration. At Aylesbury the
Radical leader had been a man of notoriously profligate life, and when
Mr. Disraeli came to seek re-election as Tory Chancellor of the
Exchequer this tribune of the people produced at the hustings the
Radical manifesto which Mr. Disraeli had issued twenty years before.
"What do you say to that, sir?" "I say that we all sow our wild oats,
and no one knows the meaning of that phrase better than you, Mr. ----."

A member of the diplomatic service at Rome in the old days of the
Temporal Power had the honour of an interview with Pio Nono. The Pope
graciously offered him a cigar--"I am told you will find this very
fine." The Englishman made that stupidest of all answers, "Thank your
Holiness, but I have no vices." "This isn't a vice; if it was you would
have it." Another repartee from the Vatican reached me a few years ago,
when the German Emperor paid his visit to Leo XIII