Burlesques William Makepeace Thackeray

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Athelstane burst into a loud laugh, when he heard it, at the last line, but Rowena would
have had the fool whipped, had not the Thane interceded; and to him, she said, she could
refuse nothing.
CHAPTER IV.
IVANHOE REDIVIVUS.
I trust nobody will suppose, from the events described in the last chapter, that our friend
Ivanhoe is really dead. Because we have given him an epitaph or two and a monument, are
these any reasons that he should be really gone out of the world? No: as in the pantomime,
when we see Clown and Pantaloon lay out Harlequin and cry over him, we are always sure
that Master Harlequin will be up at the next minute alert and shining in his glistening coat;
and, after giving a box on the ears to the pair of them, will be taking a dance with
Columbine, or leaping gayly through the clock-face, or into the three-pair-of-stairs'
window:—so Sir Wilfrid, the Harlequin of our Christmas piece, may be run through a little,
or may make believe to be dead, but will assuredly rise up again when he is wanted, and
show himself at the right moment.
The suspicious-looking characters from whom Wamba ran away were no cut-throats and
plunderers, as the poor knave imagined, but no other than Ivanhoe's friend, the hermit, and
a reverend brother of his, who visited the scene of the late battle in order to see if any
Christians still survived there, whom they might shrive and get ready for heaven, or to
whom they might possibly offer the benefit of their skill as leeches. Both were prodigiously
learned in the healing art; and had about them those precious elixirs which so often occur in
romances, and with which patients are so miraculously restored. Abruptly dropping his
master's head from his lap as he fled, poor Wamba caused the knight's pate to fall with
rather a heavy thump to the ground, and if the knave had but stayed a minute longer, he
would have heard Sir Wilfrid utter a deep groan. But though the fool heard him not, the
holy hermits did; and to recognize the gallant Wilfrid, to withdraw the enormous dagger
still sticking out of his back, to wash the wound with a portion of the precious elixir, and to
pour a little of it down his throat, was with the excellent hermits the work of an instant:
which remedies being applied, one of the good men took the knight by the heels and the
other by the head, and bore him daintily from the castle to their hermitage in a neighboring
rock. As for the Count of Chalus, and the remainder of the slain, the hermits were too much
occupied with Ivanhoe's case to mind them, and did not, it appears, give them any elixir: so
that, if they are really dead, they must stay on the rampart stark and cold; or if otherwise,
when the scene closes upon them as it does now, they may get up, shake themselves, go to
the slips and drink a pot of porter, or change their stage-clothes and go home to supper. My