one by one, from a pure antispastic acatalectic tetrameter? Now, sir, there are three questions for you: theatrical, mythological, and metrical; to every one of which an Athenian would give an answer that would lay me prostrate in my own nothingness.
Mr. Mac Quedy.—Well, sir, as to your metre and your mythology, they may e’en wait a wee. For your comedy there is the “Gentle Shepherd” of the divine Allan Ramsay.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott.—The “Gentle Shepherd”! It is just as much a comedy as the Book of Job.
Mr. Mac Quedy.—Well, sir, if none of us have written a comedy, I cannot see that it is any such great matter, any more than I can conjecture what business a man can have at this time of day with Jupiter’s great-grandfather.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott.—The great business is, sir, that you call yourselves Athenians, while you know nothing that the Athenians thought worth knowing, and dare not show your noses before the civilised world in the practice of any one art in which they were excellent. Modern Athens, sir! the assumption is a personal affront to every man who has a Sophocles in his library. I will thank you for an anchovy.
Mr. Mac Quedy.—Metaphysics, sir; metaphysics. Logic and moral philosophy. There we are at home. The Athenians only sought the way, and we have found it; and to all this we have added political economy, the science of sciences.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott.—A hyperbarbarous technology, that no Athenian ear could have borne. Premises assumed without evidence, or in spite of it; and conclusions drawn from them so logically, that they must necessarily be erroneous.
Mr. Skionar.—I cannot agree with you, Mr. Mac Quedy, that you have found the true road of metaphysics, which the Athenians only sought. The Germans have found it, sir: the sublime Kant and his disciples.
Mr. Mac Quedy.—I have read the sublime Kant, sir, with an anxious desire to understand him, and I confess I have not succeeded.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott.—He wants the two great requisites of head and tail.
Mr. Skionar.—Transcendentalism is the philosophy of intuition, the development of universal convictions; truths which are inherent in the organisation of mind, which cannot be obliterated, though they may be obscured, by superstitious prejudice on the one hand, and by the Aristotelian logic on the other.
Mr. Mac Quedy.—Well, sir, I have no notion of logic obscuring a question.
Mr. Skionar.—There is only one true logic, which is the transcendental; and this can prove only the one true philosophy, which is also the transcendental. The logic of your Modern Athens can prove everything equally; and that is, in my opinion, tantamount to proving nothing at all.
Mr. Crotchet.—The sentimental against the rational, the intuitive against the inductive, the ornamental against the useful, the intense against the tranquil, the romantic against the classical; these are great and interesting controversies, which I should like, before I die, to see satisfactorily settled.
Mr. Firedamp.—There is another great question, greater than all these, seeing that it is necessary to be alive in order to settle any question; and this is the question of water against human life. Wherever there is water, there is malaria, and wherever there is malaria, there are the elements of death. The great object of a wise man should be to live on a gravelly hill, without so much as a duck-pond within ten miles of him, eschewing cisterns and waterbutts, and taking care that there be no gravel-pits for lodging the rain. The sun sucks up infection from water, wherever it exists on the face of the earth.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott.—Well, sir, you have for you the authority of the ancient mystagogue, who said: ’Εστιν ὔδωρ ψυχῇ θάνατος. For my part I care not a rush (or any other aquatic and inesculent vegetable) who or what sucks up either the water or the infection. I think the proximity of wine a matter of much more importance than the longinquity of water. You are here within a quarter of a mile of the Thames, but in the cellar of my friend, Mr. Crotchet, there is the talismanic antidote of a thousand dozen of old wine; a beautiful spectacle, I assure you, and a model of arrangement.
Mr. Firedamp.—Sir, I feel the malignant influence of the river in every part of my system. Nothing but my great friendship for Mr. Crotchet would have brought me so nearly within the jaws of the lion.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott.—After dinner, sir, after dinner, I will meet you on this question. I shall then be armed for the strife. You may fight like Hercules against Achelous, but I shall flourish the Bacchic thyrsus, which changed rivers into wine: as Nonnus sweetly sings, Οίνω κυματόεντι μέλας κελάρυζεν Υδάςπης.
Mr. Crotchet, jun.—I hope, Mr. Firedamp, you will let your friendship carry you a little closer into the jaws of the lion. I am fitting up a flotilla of pleasure-boats, with spacious cabins, and a good cellar, to carry a choice philosophical party up the Thames and Severn, into the Ellesmere canal, where we shall be among the mountains of North Wales; which we may climb or not, as we think proper; but we will, at any rate, keep our floating hotel well provisioned, and we will try to settle all the questions over which a shadow of doubt yet hangs in the world of philosophy.
Mr. Firedamp.—Out of my great friendship for you, I will certainly go; but I do not expect to survive the experiment.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott.—Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quæ vehat Argo Delectos Heroas. I will be of the party, though I must hire an officiating curate, and deprive poor dear Mrs. Folliott, for several weeks, of the pleasure of combing my wig.
Lord Bossnowl.—I hope, if I am to be of the party, our ship is not to be the ship of fools: He! he!
The Rev. Dr. Folliott.—If you are one of the party, sir, it most assuredly will not: Ha! ha!
Lord Bossnowl.—Pray sir, what do you mean by Ha! ha!?
The Rev. Dr. Folliott.—Precisely, sir, what you mean by He! he!
Mr. Mac Quedy.—You need not dispute about terms; they are two modes of expressing merriment, with or without reason; reason being in no way essential to mirth. No man should ask another why he laughs, or at what, seeing that he does not always know, and that, if he does, he is not a responsible agent. Laughter is an involuntary action of certain muscles, developed in the human species by the progress of civilisation. The savage never laughs.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott.—No, sir, he has nothing to laugh at. Give him Modern Athens, the “learned friend,” and the Steam Intellect Society. They will develop his muscles.
CHAPTER III
THE ROMAN CAMP
He loved her more then seven yere,
Yet was he of her love never the nere;
He was not ryche of golde and fe,
A gentyll man forsoth was he.
The Reverend Doctor Folliott having promised to return to dinner, walked back to his vicarage, meditating whether he should pass the morning in writing his next sermon, or in angling for trout, and had nearly decided in favour of the latter proposition, repeating to himself, with great unction, the lines of Chaucer:
And as for me, though that I can but lite,
On bokis for to read I me delite,
And
