* *
"Ste. Genevieve (422-572), born just outside Paris, spent a
long life in the city."--_Daily Paper._
Wherever it was spent, it was clearly a long life.
* * * * *
"---- College is the chosen home, the favoured haunt
of educational success. Our staff is composed of lineal
descendants of poets, seers, or savants, and it is the
intention of this formidable phalanx of intellectuals to drive
the whole world before them! We, of course, will say that
these classes will be famous, and well worth attending. In
Carlyle especially, the undersigned, with due modesty, expects
to constitute himself a Memnon, and to receive the sage of
Chelsea's martial pibroch from Hades, transmit it to the
listeners, and to thrill them to the very marrow of their
bones!"--_Advt. in Indian Paper_.
We should like to hear what the sage's martial pibroch has to say
about the advertiser's "due modesty."
* * * * *
LAXITY IN QUOTATIONS.
Among the many privileges which I propose to claim as a set-off for
what are called advancing years is a greater laxity in quotation. When
I have made a quotation I mean that that shall _be_ the quotation,
and I don't intend to be driven either to the original source or to
cyclopaedias of literature for verification. DANTE, for instance, is
a most prolific fount of quotations, especially for those who do not
know the original Italian. If I have quoted the words "_Galeotto fu
il libro e chi lo scrisse_" once, I have quoted them a hundred times,
always with an excellent effect and often giving the impression that
I am an Italian scholar, which I am not. But surely it is not usual
to abstain from a quotation because to use it would give a false
impression? I am perfectly certain, for instance, that there are
plenty of Italians who quote _Hamlet_, but know no more of English
than the words they quote, so I dare say that brings us right in the
end.
Then there is the quotation about "a very parfitt gentil knight," or
words to that effect. At the moment of writing it down I felt that my
version was so correct that I would go to the scaffold for it; but
at this very instant a doubt insinuates itself. Is "parfitt" with two
"t's" the right spelling?
It is related somewhere that TENNYSON and EDWARD FITZGERALD once
conspired together to see which of them could write the most
Wordsworthi
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