"'Didst e'er read Dante!'--Never. 'Cruel man!
Take, take him, Williams,--I--I never can.'"

_N.B._--Williams was the other examiner. Garbet went on with a further
question nevertheless,--as he was affectedly fond of Italian:--

"'Dost know the language love delights in most?
If thou dost not, thy character is lost.'
'Yes, sir!'--the youth retorts with just surprise,
'Love's language is the language of the eyes!'"

In those days, as perhaps also in these, like Pope, "I spake in
numbers," verse being almost--well, not quite--easier than prose. In
fact, some of my critics have heretofore to my disparagement stumbled on
the printed truth that he is little better than an improvisatore in
rhyme. And this word "rhyme" reminds me now of a very curious question I
raised some years after my Oxford days in more than one magazine
article, as to when rhyme was invented, and by whom: the conclusion
being that intoning monks found out how easily the cases of Latin nouns
and tenses of verbs, &c., jingled with each other, and that troubadours
and trouveres carried thus the seeds of song all over Europe in about
the ninth century, until which time rhythm was the only recognised form
of versification, rhyme having strangely escaped discovery for more than
four thousand years. Is it not a marvel (and another marvel that no one
noticed it before) that not one of the old poets, Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
and I think Sanscrit, Arabic, and Celtic too, ever (except by manifest
accident, now intentionally ignored) stumbled upon the good idea of
terminating their metres with rhyme? Where is there any ode of Horace,
or Anacreon,--where any psalm of David; any epigram of Martial, any
heroic verse of Virgil, or philosophic argument of
Lucretius,--decorated, enlivened, and brightened by the now only too
frequent ornament of rhyme?

* * * * *

I have just found among my old archived papers, faded by nearly six
decades of antiquity, a treatise which I wrote at nineteen, styled by me
"A Vindication of the Wisdom of Scripture in Matters of Natural
Science." This has never seen the light, even in extracts; and probably
never can attain to the dignity of print, seeing it is written against
all compositor law on both sides up and down of a quarto paper book.
Therein are treated, from both the scriptural and the scientific points
of view, many subjects, of which these are some: Cosmogony, miracles (in
chi