ough) that he had commenced shouting before he
was out of the wood. For my own part, if I go so far as to say that the
result promises, in the Frenchman's phrase, to 'cover me with glory,' I beg
the reader to remember that the idea of 'covering' is of most variable
extent: the glory may envelope one in a voluminous robe--a princely mantle
that may require a long suite of train-bearers, or may pinch and vice one's
arms into that succinct garment (now superannuated) which some eighty years
ago drew its name from the distinguished Whig family in England of Spencer.
Anticipating, therefore, that I _shall_--nay, insisting, and mutinously, if
needful, that I _will_--be covered with glory by the approaching result, I
do not contemplate anything beyond that truncated tunic, once known as a
'spencer,' and which is understood to cover only the shoulders and the
chest.

Now, then, all being ready, and the arena being cleared of competitors
(for I suppose it is fully understood that everybody but myself has
retired from the contest), thrice, in fact, has the trumpet sounded, 'Do
you give it up?' Some preparations there are to be made in all cases of
contest. Meantime, let it be clearly understood what it is that the
contest turns upon. Supposing that one had been called, like OEdipus
of old, to a turn-up with that venerable girl the Sphinx, most
essential it would have been that the clerk of the course (or however
you designate the judge, the umpire, &c.) should have read the riddle
propounded to Greece: how else judge of the solution? At present the
elements of the case to be decided stand thus:--

A Roman noble, a man, in fact, of senatorial rank, has been robbed,
robbed with violence, and with cruel scorn, of a lovely young wife, to
whom he was most tenderly attached. But by whom? the indignant reader
demands. By a younger son[8] of the Roman emperor Vespasian.

[8] But holding what rank, and what precise station, at the time of the
outrage? At this point I acknowledge a difficulty. The criminal was in
this case Domitian, the younger son of Vespasian, the tenth Caesar,
younger Brother of Titus, the eleventh Caesar, and himself, under the
name of Domitian, the twelfth of the Caesars, consequently the closing
prince in that series of the initial twelve Caesars whom Suetonius had
undertaken to record. Now the difficulty lies here, which yet I have
never seen noticed in any book: was this violence perpetrated before or
after Domit