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.
    It was to this person, such as we have described him, that the Prince
addressed his imperious command to make place for Isaac and Rebecca. Athelstane,
utterly confounded at an order which the manners and feelings of the times
rendered so injuriously insulting, unwilling to obey, yet undetermined how to
resist,