was,
the risk that the successions might have become confused, and so that
you and another follower of traditions should show up the same identical
vulgus some fine morning; in which case, when it happened, considerable
grief was the result--but when did such risk hinder boys or men from
short cuts and pleasant paths?

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 and
feeble result of eight elegiac lines, the minimum quantity for his form,
and finishing up with two highly moral lines extra, making ten in all,
which he cribbed entire from one of his books, beginning "O genus
humanum," 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.

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. This was all he cared for, to produce eight
lines with no false quantities or concords: whether the words were apt,
or what the sense was, mattered nothing; and, as the article was all
new, not a line beyond the minimum did the followers of the dogged
method ever produce.

The third, or artistic method, was Arthur's. He considered first what
point in the character or event which was the subject could most neatly
be brought out within the limits of a vulgus, tryin