them all.

"Well, Sheridan, what news have you brought with you?" asked the prince.

The answer was a laugh. "Nothing, but that Downing Street has turned into
Parnassus. The astounding fact is, that Grenville has teemed, and, as the
fruits of the long vacation, has produced a Latin epigram.

'Veris risit Amor roses caducas:
Cui Ver--"Vane puer, tuine flores,
Quaeso, perpetuum manent in aevum?'"

The prince laughed. "He writes on the principle, of course, that in one's
dotage we are privileged to return to the triflings of our infancy, and
that Downing Street cannot be better employed in these days than as a
chapel of ease to Eton."

"Yet, even there, he is but a translator," said Sir P----.

"'The tenth transmitter of an idler's line,'

It is merely a _rechauffe_ of the old Italian.

'Amor volea schernir la primavera
Sulla breve durata e passegiera
Dei vaghi fiori suoi.
Ma la belle stagione a lui rispose
Forse i piacere tuoi
Vita piu lunga avran delle mie rose.'"

The prince, who, under Cyril Jackson, had acquired no trivial scholarship,
now alluded to a singular poetic production, _printed_ in 1618, which
seemed distinctly to announce the French Revolution.

'Festinat propere cursu jam temporis ordo,
Quo locus, et Franci majestas prisca, senatus,
Papa, sacerdotes, missae, simulacra, Deique
Fictitii, atque omnis superos exosa potestas,
Judicio Domini justo sublata peribunt.[A]

[Footnote A:

The time is rushing on
When France shall be undone;
And like a dream shall pass,
Pope, monarch, priest, and mass;
And vengeance shall be just,
And all her shrines be dust,
And thunder dig the grave
Of sovereign and of slave.]

"The production is certainly curious," remarked W----; "but poets always
had something of the fortune-teller; and it is striking, that in many of
the modern Italian Latinists you will find more instances of strong
declamation against Rome, and against France as its chief supporter, than
perhaps in any other authorship of Europe. Audacity was the result of
terror. All Italy reminds one of the papal palace at Avignon--the
banqueting-rooms above, the dungeons of the Inquisition below; popes and
princes feasting within sound of the rack and the scourge. The Revolution
is but the ripening of the disease; the hydrophobia which has been lurking
in the system for centuries."

"Why, then," said Sheridan, "shall we all wonder at what all