to write the
bastard "O. K." of approval and wrote, instead, a stately "Imprimatur."
He placed the proofs in their envelope and sealed it with lips that
trembled like a priest's when giving an illuminated Gospel a ritual
kiss.

The hour was late when Professor Litton finished. He stamped the
brown-paper envelope and went down the steps of the boarding-house that
had been for years his nearest approach to a home. He left the precious
envelope on the hall-tree, whence it would be taken to the post-office
for the first mail.

Feeling the need of a breath of air, he stepped out on the porch. It was
a spring midnight and the college roofs were wonderful under the
quivering moon--or _tremulo sub lumine_, as he remembered it. And he
remembered how Quintus Smyrnaeus had said that the Amazon queen walked
among her outshone handmaidens, "as when, on the wide heavens, among the
stars, the divine Selene moves pre-eminent among them all."

He thought of everything in terms of the past; yet, when he heard,
mingled with the vague murmur of the night, a distant song of befuddled
collegians, among whose voices Teed's soared pre-eminent above the key,
he was not pleasantly reminded of the tipsy army of Dionysus. He was
revolted and, returning to his solitude, closed an indignant door on
the disgrace.

Poor old Litton! His learning had so frail a connection with the life
about him! Steeped in the classics and acquainted with the minutest
details of their texts, he never caught their spirit; never seemed to
realize that they are classics because their authors were so close to
life and imbued them with such vitality that time has not yet rendered
them obsolete.

He had hardly suspected the mischief that is in them. A more innocent
man could hardly be imagined or one more versed in the lore of evil.
Persons who believe that what is called immoral literature has a
debasing effect must overlook such men as Litton. He dwelt among those
Greek and Roman authors who excelled in exploiting the basest emotions
and made poems out of putridity.

He read in the original those terrifying pages that nobody has ever
dared to put into English without paraphrase--the polished infamies of
Martial; the exquisite atrocities of Theocritus and Catullus. Yet these
books left him as unsullied as water leaves a duck's back. They infected
him no more than a medical work gives the doctor that studies it the
diseases it describes. The appallingly learned Profe