e know, and we do _not_ know, what it was that he said. We have
bequeathed to us by history two words--involving eight letters--which in
their present form, with submission to certain grandees of classic
literature, mean exactly nothing. These two words must be regarded as
the raw material upon which we have to work: and out of these we are
required to turn out a rational saying for Aelius Lamia, under the
following five conditions:--First, it must allude to his wife, as one
that is lost to him irrecoverably; secondly, it must glance at a gloomy
tyrant who bars him from rejoining her; thirdly, it must reply to the
compliment which had been paid to the sweetness of his own voice;
fourthly, it should in strictness contain some allusion calculated not
only to irritate, but even to alarm or threaten his jealous and vigilant
enemy; fifthly, doing all these things, it ought also to absorb, as its
own main elements, the eight letters contained in the present senseless
words--'_Heu taceo._'

Here is a monstrous quantity of work to throw upon any two words in any
possible language. Even Shakspere's clown,[9] when challenged to furnish
a catholic answer applicable to all conceivable occasions, cannot do it
in less than nine letters--namely, _Oh lord, sir_. I, for my part,
satisfied that the existing form of _Heu taceo_ was mere indictable and
punishable nonsense, but yet that this nonsense must enter as chief
element into the stinging sense of Lamia, gazed for I cannot tell how
many weeks at these impregnable letters, viewing them sometimes as a
fortress that I was called upon to escalade, sometimes as an anagram
that I was called upon to re-organise into the life which it had lost
through some dislocation of arrangement. Finally the result in which I
landed, and which fulfilled all the conditions laid down was this:--Let
me premise, however, what _at any rate_ the existing darkness attests,
that some disturbance of the text must in some way have arisen; whether
from the gnawing of a rat, or the spilling of some obliterating fluid at
this point of some critical or unique MS. It is sufficient for us that
the vital word has survived. I suppose, therefore, that Lamia had
replied to the friend who praised the sweetness of his voice, 'Sweet is
it? Ah, would to Heaven it might prove Orpheutic.' Ominous in this case
would be the word Orpheutic to the ears of Domitian: for every
school-boy knows that this means a _wife-revoking voice_. Bu