So many words, so little time to read 'em, and now with your indulgence 
I'll empty a bucket more in the topic.  The Gentle Reader is challenged 
to identify, from the shavings, below five most excellently crafted works 
from bygone days, well-wrought books worthy to endure an hundred years, 
which do tutor us yet who would mend our Mannerism.
 
No liberties have been taken with the text save to file off gently and 
respectfully, here and there, some few marks too telling of their tales.  
And some other marks have carefully been left, that will guide the canny 
reader to the truth.
 
 
              T H E   M A N N E R I S T   Q U I Z  # 2
 
 
1.  But it is well to look to the future, for one cannot be a Beau 
forever.  The back streets are full of tailors of genius and young men 
with shoulders, chests, and calves.  The life itself is fattening, 
expensive, and somewhat briefer than other occupations.  If Beaux do not 
perish on the dueling ground, hunting field, or in gaming rooms, they 
tend to dwindle away, deeply in debt, in an unfashionable watering place. 
Reduced to drinking gin, they wait for a summons from an August Personage 
they have somehow offended.
 
 
2.  And not a levity blew their way all in the azure morning, and not a 
vanity that reached their thoughts, going from mind to mind, but they 
welcomed and toyed with and acclaimed as new.  So they passed the 
morning, and when the heat of the day began to increase they loitered to 
a lane that had one long leafy roof, and there they sat in the shade and 
ate fruit that they had in baskets and listened while each in turn 
recounted the idlest tales.
 
 
3.  I am to be at the ball when the opera is over, at least a glass 
before midnight.  The fourth box on the left-hand side is yours.  I am to 
look at the doorbase of the second box, where a handkerchief will be 
caught.  If it is white, edged with lace, perfumed with honeymusk, I am 
to go below and make myself seen at the gaming tables.  But if the 
handkerchief is azure and rose-perfumed, I am to take it away and leave 
in its place another; then without being seen on the dancing floor or at 
the games, go at once to my lord's box, but leave the panels up and the 
curtains closed.  Someone will presently tap twice, a lady.  I am to 
greet her with my lord's sonnet, eat with her, declare my passion for 
her. . .
 
 
4.  Nay, look you now, you are angry, uncle: why you know, an a man have 
not skill in the hawking, and hunting-languages nowadays, I'll not give a 
rush for him.  They are more studied than the Greek, or the Latin.  He is 
for no gallants' company without 'hem.
 
 
5.  When he wakened the air was cold and the day was beginning to grow 
dark.  Prince N thought he would go down and dine at a tavern in the 
town, for no servants had been left with him.  But what was his annoyance 
when he found that his boots, his sword, his cap, his cloak---all his 
clothes, in fact, except those he wore---had been taken away by the 
courtiers, merely to spite him!  His wardrobe had been ransacked, and 
everything that had not been carried off had been cut up, burned, and 
destroyed.  Never was there such a spectacle of wicked mischief.  It was 
as if hay had been made of everything he possessed.  What was worse, he 
had not a penny in his pocket to buy new things; and his father had 
stopped his allowance of -L-50,000 a month.