style="font-size:15px;"> Like heretics in flaming vest arrayedEach angry Don lifts high his injured head,
Or 'stands between the living and the dead.'
Still from St. Mary's pulpit echoes wide
Primó, beware of truth, whate'er betide;
Deinde, from deep Charybdis while you steer
Lest damned Socinus charm you with his sneer,
Watch above all, so not Saint Thomas spake, Lest upon Calvin, Scylla's rook, you break," &c. &c.
These forgotten trivials, wherein the allusions do not now show clear, are, I know, barely excusable even thus curtly: but I choose to save a touch or two from annihilation. Here is another little bit; this time from a somewhat vicious parody on my rival Rickard's prize poem: it is fairest to produce at length first his serious conclusion to the normal fifty-liner, and then my less reverent imitation of it. Here, then, is the end of Rickard's poem:—
"Bright was the doom which snatched her favourite son,
Nor came too soon to him whose task was done.
Long burned his restless spirit to explore
That stream which eye had never tracked before,
Whose course, 'tis said, in Western springs begun
Flows on eternal to the rising sun!
Though thousand perils seemed to bar his way,
And all save him shrunk backward in dismay,
Still hope prophetic poured the ardent prayer
To reach that stream, though doomed to perish there!
That prayer was heard; by Niger's mystic flood
One rapturous day the speechless dreamer stood,
Fixt on that stream his glistening eyes he kept—
The sun went down—the wayworn wanderer slept!"
So much for the prize-taker; the prize-loser vented his spleen as thus:—
"Bright was the doom that diddled Mungo Park,
Yet very palpably obscure and dark.
Long burned his throat, for want of coming nigh
That stream he long'd and pray'd for wistfully,
Whose course, 'tis said, that no one can tell where
It flows eternal; guessing isn't fair.
Though miles a thousand had he tramp'd along,
And all, save him, were sure that path was wrong,
Still hope prophetic poured the ardent prayer
He'd find that stream—if it was anywhere!
That prayer was heard, of course, though no one knows
Where this said Niger never flowed, or flows;
All that is known is, that a dreamer stood
In speechless transport by a mystic flood,
And after fixing on't his glistening eyes,
The sun goes down, and so the dreamer dies!"
For the fourth promised specimen, the best excuse is that Garbet really did utter the words quoted—and the answer he received about love is exact, and became famous:—
"'Didst e'er read Dante!'—Never. 'Cruel man!
Take, take him, Williams—I—I never can.'"
N.B.—Williams was the other examiner. Garbet went on with a further question nevertheless—as he was affectedly fond of Italian:—
"'Dost know the language love delights in most?
If thou dost not, thy character is lost.'
'Yes, sir!'—the youth retorts with just surprise,
'Love's language is the language of the eyes!'"
In those days, as perhaps also in these, like Pope, "I spake in numbers," verse being almost—well, not quite—easier than prose. In fact, some of my critics have heretofore to my disparagement stumbled on the printed truth that he is little better than an improvisatore in rhyme. And this word "rhyme" reminds me now of a very curious question I raised some years after my Oxford days in more than one magazine article, as to when rhyme was invented, and by whom: the conclusion being that intoning monks found out how easily the cases of Latin nouns and tenses of verbs, &c., jingled with each other, and that troubadours and trouveres carried thus the seeds of song all over Europe in about the ninth century, until which time rhythm was the only recognised form of versification, rhyme having strangely escaped discovery for more than four thousand years. Is it not a marvel (and another marvel that no one noticed it before) that not one of the old poets, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and I think Sanscrit, Arabic, and Celtic too, ever (except by manifest accident, now intentionally ignored) stumbled upon the good idea of terminating their metres with rhyme? Where is there any ode of Horace, or Anacreon—where any psalm of David; any epigram of Martial, any heroic verse of Virgil, or philosophic argument of Lucretius—decorated, enlivened, and brightened by the now only too frequent ornament of rhyme?
I have just found among my old archived papers, faded by nearly six decades of antiquity, a treatise which I wrote at nineteen, styled by me "A Vindication of the Wisdom of Scripture in Matters of Natural Science." This has never seen the light, even in extracts; and probably never can attain to the dignity of print, seeing it is written against all compositor law on both sides up and down of a quarto paper book. Therein are treated, from both the scriptural and the scientific points of view, many subjects, of which these are some: Cosmogony, miracles (in chief Joshua's sun and moon), the circulation of the blood revealed in Ecclesiastes, magnetism as mentioned by Job, "He spreadeth out the north over the empty space and hangeth the world upon nothing," the blood's innate vitality—"which is the life thereof," the earth's centre, or orbit, and inclination, astronomy, spirits, the rainbow, the final conflagration of our atmosphere to purify the globe, and many other matters terrestrial and celestial. Some day a patient scribe may be found to decipher this decayed manuscript and set out orderly its miscellaneous contents. I began it at eighteen, and finished it when at Oxford.
There is also now before me another faded copybook of my early Christ Church days containing ninety-one striking parallel passages between Horace and Holy Writ; some being very remarkable, as Hor. Sat. i. 8, and Isaiah xliv. 13, &c., about "making a god of a tree whereof he burneth part:" also such well-known lines as "Quid sit futurum eras, fuge quærere," and "Quis scit an adjiciant hodiernæ crastina summæ Tempora Di superi?"—compared with "Take no thought for the morrow" and "Boast not thyself of to-morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth." With many more; in fact I collected nearly a hundred out of Horace, besides a few from others of the classics.
CHAPTER VIII.
