Questions which can only be answered by the parrotings of a memory crammed to disease with all sorts of heterogeneous diet can form no test of genius, taste, judgment, or natural capacity. Competitive Examination takes for its norma: 'It is better to learn many things ill than one thing well'; or rather: 'It is better to learn to gabble about everything than to understand anything.' This is not the way to discover the wood of which Mercuries are made. I have been told that this precious scheme has been borrowed from China: a pretty fountain-head for moral and political improvement: and if so, I may say, after Petronius: 'This windy and monstrous loquacity has lately found its way to us from Asia, and like a pestilential star has blighted the minds of youth otherwise rising to greatness.'{1}
1 Nuper ventosa isthaec et enormis loquacitas Athenas ex
Asia commigravit, animosque juvenum, ad magna surgentes,
veluti pestilenti quodam sidere afflavit.
Lord Curryfin. There is something to be said on behalf of applying the same tests, addressing the same questions, to everybody.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. I shall be glad to hear what can be said on that behalf.
Lord Curryfin (after a pause). 'Mass,' as the second grave-digger says in Hamlet, 'I cannot tell.'
A chorus of laughter dissolved the sitting.
CHAPTER XX
ALGERNON AND MORGANA—OPPORTUNITY AND REPENTANCE—THE FOREST IN WINTER
Les violences qu'on se fait pour s'empêcher d'aimer sont
souvent plus cruelles que les rigueurs de ce qu'on aime.
—La Rochefoucauld.