Alfred, who was playing with his examiner all this time, pretended to cudgel his brains, then went on, and warmed involuntarily with the lines—
“Cognatasque acies et rupto foedere regni
Certatum totis concussi viribus orbis
In commune nefas; infestis que obvia signis
Signa, pares aquilas, et pila minantia pilis.”
“He seems to have a good memory,” said the examiner, rather taken aback.
“Oh, that is nothing for him,” observed Wycherley;
“He has Horace all by heart; you'd wonder:
And mouths out Homer's Greek like thunder.”
The great faculty of Memory thus tested, Dr. Eskell proceeded to a greater: Judgment. “Spirited lines those, sir.”
“Yes, sir; but surely rather tumid. 'The whole forces of the shaken globe?' But little poets love big words.”
“I see; you agree with Horace, that so great a work as an epic poem should open modestly with an invocation.”
“No, sir,” said Alfred. “I think that rather an arbitrary and peevish canon of friend Horace. The AEneid, you know, begins just as he says an epic ought not to begin; and the AEneid is the greatest Latin Epic. In the next place the use of Modesty is to keep a man from writing an epic poem at all but, if he will have that impudence, why then he had better have the courage to plunge into the Castalian stream, like Virgil and Lucan, not crawl in funking and holding on by the Muse's apron-string. But—excuse me—quorsum haec tam putida tendunt? What have the Latin poets to do with this modern's sanity or insanity?”
Mr. Abbott snorted contemptuously in support of the query. But Dr. Eskell smiled, and said: “Continue to answer me as intelligently, and you may find it has a great deal to do with it.”