Wherever it was spent, it was clearly a long life.
"—— College is the chosen home, the favoured haunt of educational success. Our staff is composed of lineal descendants of poets, seers, or savants, and it is the intention of this formidable phalanx of intellectuals to drive the whole world before them! We, of course, will say that these classes will be famous, and well worth attending. In Carlyle especially, the undersigned, with due modesty, expects to constitute himself a Memnon, and to receive the sage of Chelsea's martial pibroch from Hades, transmit it to the listeners, and to thrill them to the very marrow of their bones!"—Advt. in Indian Paper.
We should like to hear what the sage's martial pibroch has to say about the advertiser's "due modesty."
LAXITY IN QUOTATIONS.
Among the many privileges which I propose to claim as a set-off for what are called advancing years is a greater laxity in quotation. When I have made a quotation I mean that that shall be the quotation, and I don't intend to be driven either to the original source or to cyclopaedias of literature for verification. DANTE, for instance, is a most prolific fount of quotations, especially for those who do not know the original Italian. If I have quoted the words "Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse" once, I have quoted them a hundred times, always with an excellent effect and often giving the impression that I am an Italian scholar, which I am not. But surely it is not usual to abstain from a quotation because to use it would give a false impression? I am perfectly certain, for instance, that there are plenty of Italians who quote Hamlet, but know no more of English than the words they quote, so I dare say that brings us right in the end.
Then there is the quotation about "a very parfitt gentil knight," or words to that effect. At the moment of writing it down I felt that my version was so correct that I would go to the scaffold for it; but at this very instant a doubt insinuates itself. Is "parfitt" with two "t's" the right spelling?
It is related somewhere that TENNYSON and EDWARD FITZGERALD once conspired together to see which of them could write the most Wordsworthian line, and that the result was:—
"A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman."