p, and thereafter they
have skirmished on the outskirts and have shown a disinclination to come
to grips with the LAUREATE on the main question whether these hexameters
are a success or a failure. Now I have no hesitation whatever in
admitting my metrical ignorance and at the same time in denouncing as a
fiasco the experiment of Dr. BRIDGES. I have spent some time in
struggling with his hexameters; I have attempted to track his dactyls to
their lair; I have followed up what I took to be his spondees, and I am
thankful to say that I have managed to survive.

Let me now give some examples, not composed, it is true, by the
LAUREATE, but by myself. This is not an unfair proceeding, for it will
serve to show the effect of _Ibant Obscuri_ on a mind not too obtuse. I
promise that the rules shall be observed. There shall be six feet in
each line, dactyls or spondees, and the fifth foot shall be a dactyl and
the sixth a spondee or a trochee. Are you ready? Go!

Apollo now came forth his course through the sky to fulfil;
In other words it was morning and most people got out of bed;
And fathers of families munched and grumbled at their breakfasts,
Denouncing their bacon and not to be mollified with their
Coffee or tea, as the case might be, and the housewives reproved them,
Saying 'twas impossible to control them with such an example.

Beyond the above I cannot go, but I must add that the lines are of the
most perfect metrical lucidity and the purest melody when compared with
some written by the LAUREATE in _Ibant Obscuri_.

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

Mr. H.G. WELLS also among the New Theologians is not an entirely
unexpected event. We have all had intimation in his later writings of
the coming of some such thesis as _God, The Invisible King_ (CASSELL). I
can see the deans making mincemeat of the rash author. All's well if
they'll eat some of the meat. And they may. At least this is no
super-subtle modernist divine dealing out old coins surreptitiously
stamped with a new image and superscription, but a plain blunt heretic
who knows his mind (or, rather, mood). But it is a reverent, indeed, I
dare to say, a noble book. The sanely and securely orthodox may read it
with profit if with shock. It should brace their faith, and will rob
them of nothing but a too-ready doubt that so forthright a house-breaker
may be a builder in his own wa