nd, are
not studious, as a rule.

"Then I must return, Lord Birkenhead, to your library," said the bishop,
"and that without delay, for this appears to be a matter in which the
services of one of the higher clergy, however unworthy, may prove of
incalculable benefit."

"If I could only hope," answered Lord Birkenhead (who was a Catholic)
with a deep sigh, "that his reverence would recognize Anglican orders!"

The bishop was now, as may be fancied, on his mettle, and without further
parley, retired to the library. The rest of the men awaited his return,
and beguiled the moments of expectation with princely havannas.

In about half an hour the bishop reappeared, and a close observer might
have detected a shade of paleness on his apostolic features, yet his face
was radiant like that of a good man who has performed a good action.
Being implored to relieve the anxiety of the company, the worthy prelate
spoke as follows:

"On entering the library, which was illuminated by a single lamp, I found
myself alone. I drew a chair to the fire, and, taking up a volume of M.
Renan's which chanced to be lying on the table, I composed myself to
detect the sophistries of this brilliant but unprincipled writer. Thus,
by an effort of will, I distracted myself from that state of 'expectant
attention' to which modern science attributes such phantoms and spectral
appearances as can neither be explained away by a morbid condition of the
liver, nor as caused by the common rat (Mus rattus). I should observe by
the way," said the learned bishop, interrupting his own narrative, "that
scepticism will in vain attempt to account, by the latter cause, namely
rats, for the spectres, Lemures, simulacra, and haunted houses of the
ancient Greeks and Romans. With these supernatural phenomena, as they
prevailed in Athens and Rome, we are well acquainted, not only from the
Mostellaria of Plautus, but from the numerous ghost-stories of Pliny,
Plutarch, the Philopseudes of Lucian, and similar sources. But it will
at once be perceived, and admitted even by candid men of science, that
these spiritual phenomena of the classical period cannot plausibly, nor
even possibly, be attributed to the agency of rats, when we recall the
fact that the rat was an animal unknown to the ancients. As the learned
M. Selys Longch observes in his Etudes de Micromammalogie (Paris, 1839,
p. 59), 'the origin of the rat is obscure, the one thing certain is that
the vermin w