ead, the
principles, or the taste,--when you have discovered that there is some
one sore to be healed, one defect to be repaired; and you have rubbed
your spectacles, and got your hand fairly into that recess between your
frill and your waistcoat. But to go to you cut and dry, monotonously,
regularly, book and exercise in hand; to see the mournful patience with
which you tear yourself from that great volume of Cardan in the very
honeymoon of possession; and then to note those mild eyebrows gradually
distend themselves into perplexed diagonals over some false quantity or
some barbarous collocation, till there steal forth that horrible Papce!
which means more on your lips than I am sure it ever did when Latin was
a live language, and Papce a natural and unpedantic ejaculation!--no,
I would sooner blunder through the dark by myself a thousand times than
light my rushlight at the lamp of that Phlegethonian Papce!

And then my father would wisely and kindly, but wondrous slowly, erase
three fourths of one's pet verses, and intercalate others that one saw
were exquisite, but could not exactly see why. And then one asked why;
and my father shook his head in despair, and said, "But you ought to
feel why!"

In short, scholarship to him was like poetry; he could no more teach it
you than Pindar could have taught you how to make an ode. You breathed
the aroma, but you could no more seize and analyze it than, with the
opening of your naked hand, you could carry off the scent of a rose.
I soon left my father in peace to Cardan and to the Great Book,--which
last, by the way, advanced but slowly; for Uncle Jack had now insisted
on its being published in quarto, with illustrative plates, and those
plates took an immense time, and were to cost an immense sum,--but that
cost was the affair of the Anti-Publisher Society. But how can I settle
to work by myself? No sooner have I got into my room--penitus ab orbe
divisus, as I rashly think--than there is a tap at the door. Now it is
my mother, who is benevolently engaged upon making curtains to all the
windows (a trifling superfluity that Bolt had forgotten or disdained),
and who wants to know how the draperies are fashioned at Mr.
Trevanion's,--a pretence to have me near her, and see with her own eyes
that I am not fretting; the moment she hears I have shut myself up in my
room, she is sure that it is for sorrow. Now it is Bolt, who is making
bookshelves for my father, and desires to consu