aths?

[23] #William of Wykeham#: the founder of Winchester College,
the oldest of the great public schools of England. Here Dr.
Arnold fitted for Oxford.

[24] #Intrinsic#: inward, real, true.

[25] #Minimum#: least.

[26] #Elaborate#: prepared or thought out with great care.

THE SCIENCE OF VERSE-MAKING.

Now in the study that night, Tom was the upholder of the traditionary
method of Vulgus doing. He carefully produced two large Vulgus books,
and began diving into them, and picking out a line here, and an ending
there (tags, as they were vulgarly called), till he had gotten all
that he thought he could make fit. He then proceeded to patch his tags
together with the help of his Gradus, producing an incongruous[27] and
feeble result of eight elegiac[28] lines, the minimum quantity for his
form, and finishing up with two highly moral lines extra, making ten
in all, which he cribbed[29] entire from one of his books, beginning,
"O genus humanum,"[30] and which he himself must have used a dozen
times before, whenever an unfortunate or wicked hero, of whatever
nation or language under the sun, was the subject. Indeed, he began to
have great doubts whether the master wouldn't remember them, and so
only threw them in as extra lines, because in any case they would call
off attention from the other tags, and if detected, being extra lines,
he wouldn't be sent back to do two more in their place, while if they
passed muster again he would get marks for them.

[27] #Incongruous#: ill-fitting.

[28] #Elegiac#: a kind of verse generally used in expressing
sorrow and lamentation.

[29] #Cribbed#: stole, copied.

[30] #O genus humanum#: O human race.

The second method pursued by Martin may be called the dogged, or
prosaic, method. He, no more than Tom, took any pleasure in the task,
but having no old Vulgus books of his own, or any one's else, could
not follow the traditionary method, for which, too, as Tom remarked,
he hadn't the genius. Martin then proceeded to write down eight lines
in English, of the most matter-of-fact kind, the first that came into
his head; and to convert these, line by line, by main force of Gradus
and dictionary, into Latin that would scan.[31] This was all he
cared for, to produce eight lines with no false quantities[32] or
concords;[33] whether the words were apt, or what the sense was,
mattered nothing; and, as the article was all new, not a line