My Life as an Author

of course I ought to know, but don't. A good-looking and well-speaking friend of mine, E. H. Abney, now a Canon, was so certain that the said prizes in those two successive years were to fall to me,

my pieces were afterwards printed; both separately, and among my "Ballads and Poems," by Hall and Virtue, and are now before me. As an impartial and veteran judge

a third class, was technically possible, if I could not stand a two days' ordeal of viva voce examination, part of the whole week then exacted. However, I did all at my best on paper, specially the translations from classic poets in verse: whereof I'll find a specimen anon. The issue of all was that I was offered an honorary fourth class,

as below from Virgil: there were also three odes of Horace, a

es, sing we l

marisk and wo

l; if woods an

worthy of a

byl's song, th

dispensations

orious order;

es, and Saturn

rom heaven's brig

ses, and all

avouring eye,

drous babe,-hi

the iron age

d rejoice in gold

that my public versifying was quite extempore, as in fact is common with me. For other college memories in the literary line, I may just mention certain brochures or parodies, initialed or anonymous, whereto I must now plead guilty fo

ford?-some smal

ng songster o

ll the insect

inter's devi

ells his ad

the chastened

eted substan

fty sound the car

ht on St. Mary's in the Hampden case,

ed oft, in false

s in flaming

lifts high hi

ween the livin

. Mary's pulp

of truth, wh

eep Charybdis

inus charm you

l, so not Sain

Scylla's rook, y

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

om which snatched

on to him whose

s restless spi

ch eye had neve

is said, in West

ernal to th

perils seemed

im shrunk back

hetic poured th

eam, though doome

heard; by Nige

ay the speechle

eam his glisteni

wn,-the wayworn

ker; the prize-loser ven

doom that didd

lpably obsc

throat, for wa

long'd and pray

s said, that no o

rnal; guessi

thousand had he

m, were sure tha

hetic poured th

stream,-if it

eard, of course,

Niger never fl

own is, that a

transport by a

ng on't his gl

own, and so th

at Garbet really did utter the words quoted,-and the an

ead Dante!'-Ne

, Williams,-I-

t went on with a further question neverthel

language love

not, thy char

youth retorts wi

e is the langua

onclusion 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

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-"w

13, &c., about "making a god of a tree whereof he burneth part:" also such well-known lines as "Quid sit futurum eras, fuge qu?rere," and "Quis scit an adjiciant hodiern? crastina summ? Tempora Di superi?"-compared with "Take