“Pardon me, sir,” said she.
“And pardon me, madam,” cries the doctor, with a feigned seriousness; “I say, a boy in the fourth form at Eton would be whipt, or would deserve to be whipt at least, who made the neuter gender agree with the feminine. You have heard, however, that Virgil left his AEneid incorrect; and, perhaps, had he lived to correct it, we should not have seen the faults we now see in it.”
“Why, it is very true as you say, doctor,” cries Mrs. Atkinson; “there seems to be a false concord. I protest I never thought of it before.”
“And yet this is the Virgil,” answered the doctor, “that you are so fond of, who hath made you all of the neuter gender; or, as we say in English, he hath made mere animals of you; for, if we translate it thus,
“Woman is a various and changeable animal,
“there will be no fault, I believe, unless in point of civility to the ladies.”
Mrs. Atkinson had just time to tell the doctor he was a provoking creature, before the arrival of Booth and his friend put an end to that learned discourse, in which neither of the parties had greatly recommended themselves to each other; the doctor’s opinion of the lady being not at all heightened by her progress in the classics, and she, on the other hand, having conceived a great dislike in her heart towards the doctor, which would have raged, perhaps, with no less fury from the consideration that he had been her husband.