"M. Bratiano, Rumanian Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, has returned to Bukarest from Petrograd."—The Times.
The force of habit, we presume. How surprised the German Governor must have been to see him.
AT THE EXHIBITION OF THE "FORERUNNERS' SOCIETY."
Artist. "I RATHER LIKE THAT." Super-Critic. "BAH! PRETTY-PRETTY! CHOCOLATE BOX!"
HEXAMETERS.
I have been examining a book by the POET LAUREATE, in which that learned and painstaking man puts forward for general acceptance a new theory and a new practice of metre in English poetry. It seems that our verse is accentual, whereas it ought to be quantitative—or it may be the other way about; my brain is in such a whirl with it all that I can't be certain which is right, but I am sure that one of them is, and so I leave you to take your choice. Failing that, you can buy Dr. BRIDGES' book, which is entitled Ibant Obscuri (Oxford University Press), and thus expresses my inmost convictions about our great official poet and his followers. We are henceforth to write hexameters in English on an entirely new plan, of which the result is that they lose all likeness to any hexameters previously encountered on the slopes of Parnassus or anywhere else and become something so blind and staggering and dreadfully amorphous that the whole mind of the reader rises up in revolt against them.