The whole matter, he said, was extremely complicated, and the contingencies mentioned by His Royal Highness were very unlikely to arise.

The Prince persisted; but it was useless; for a full hour he struggled to extract a categorical answer, until at length Palmerston bowed himself out of the room.

Albert threw up his hands in shocked amazement: what could one do with such a man?
What indeed?
For, in spite of all his apologies and all his promises, within a few weeks the incorrigible reprobate was at his tricks again.
The Austrian General Haynau, notorious as a rigorous suppressor of rebellion in Hungary and Italy, and in particular as a flogger of women, came to England and took it into his head to pay a visit to Messrs.
Barclay and Perkins's brewery.

The features of "General Hyena," as he was everywhere called--his grim thin face, his enormous pepper-and-salt moustaches--had gained a horrid celebrity; and it so happened that among the clerks at the brewery there was a refugee from Vienna, who had given his fellow-workers a first-hand account of the General's characteristics.

The Austrian Ambassador, scenting danger, begged his friend not to appear in public, or, if he must do so, to cut off his moustaches first.