ysseys_.
He'd croon like one possessed the magic strain
Of heroes tossed along the unvintaged main,
And, crutch aloft in air, would fondly beat
Time to the rushing of the poet's feet.
Poetry was all his solace: those bright dames
That old Dan Chaucer in his rapture names,
And those in Villon's pages that appear
As dazzling-white as snows of yester-year,
Trooped past his eye in long procession fair.
O, Sovereign Virgin, what a crowd was there!
Helen, alas! with Paris by her side,
On the high deck crossing the sunny tide,
Circe, bright-moving in her godlike bloom
Before the throbbing music of the loom.
The love-lorn heroines of Shakespeare's plays,
The red-cheeked country girls of Burns's lays,
Would to his raptured eye the tear-drop bring,
And set his crazy quill a-sonnetting.

VOGUE OF LATIN IN FORMER TIMES.

The old-world schoolmaster believed Latin was a universal specific. He
loved the language and knew all the flock of frisky little exceptions of
gender and conjugation, even as a shepherd knows his sheep. He gave his
pupils gentle doses of the _Delectus_, and watched with eager, almost
menacing, eye, for the working of the charm. It is quite possible that
no pupil ever went over that _Delectus_, with its world-weary fragments
of trite morality, without a feeling of pleasure at the _Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire_. Yet it was educative, and moreover a boy was
equipped for life with quotations suiting every juncture. Fate was
powerless against one who had mastered the _Delectus_. The faculty of
Latin quotation was to some extent also a badge of respectability.
Fancy, too, the glory of being the exclusive possessor in a mixed
company of the knowledge that Castor and Pollux came out of the one egg!
It was a sore drawback to a boy once upon a time if he were shaky on the
compounds of _fero_.

"_The pest of the present day is the prevalence of examinations_:"
these, it is alleged, have destroyed the grand old freedom of learning
which gave full scope for the individuality alike of teacher and pupil.
Oh! those were days of the gods, when five hours were spent daily
burrowing in Virgil and Horace! Arcadia was realised--a sunny clime of
Nymphs, Fauns, and Graces. The supreme luxury of abundant time--the
leisurely chewing of sweet-phrased morsels--is gone: it is gone, that
chastity of phrase and perfection of idiom, which felt a bad quanti