IV AND WHERE TO FIND IT 99 



to which I refer. In the first place I could get 

 up an osteological primer so arid, so pedantic in 

 its terminology, so altogether distasteful to the 

 youthful mind, as to beat the recent famous pro- 

 duction of the head-masters out of the field in all 

 these excellences. Next, I could exercise my boys 

 upon easy fossils, and bring out all their powers of 

 memory and all their ingenuity in the application 

 of my osteo-grammatical rules to the interpreta- 

 tion, or construing, of those fragments. To those 

 who had reached the higher classes, I might sup- 

 ply odd bones to be built up into animals, giving 

 great honour and reward to him who succeeded in 

 fabricating monsters most entirely in accordance 

 with the rules. That would answer to verse- 

 making and essay-writing in the dead languages. 



To be sure, if a great comparative anatomist 

 were to look at thesa fabrications he might shake 

 his head, or laugh. But what then? Would 

 such a catastrophe destroy the parallel ? What, 

 think you, would Cicero, or Horace, say to the 

 production of the best sixth form going? And 

 would not Terence stop his ears and run out if he 

 could be present at an English performance of his 

 own plays ? Would Hamlet, in the mouths of a 

 set of French actors, who should insist on pro- 

 nouncing English after the fashion of their own 

 tongue, be more hideously ridiculous ? 



But it will be said that I am forgetting the 

 beauty, and the human interest, which appertain 



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