THE YOUNG SCIENTIST. 
335 
MORAL. 
Mures ! omnes mice ! be shy. 
Et auriim praebe mihi 
Benigne. 
Si lioc facis— verbuni sat — 
Avoid a huge and liungry cat 
Studiose. 
Let me give you a, verse from a poem 
on Estivation, supposed to have been 
written by a Latin tutor immured in a 
town during summer. Those who want 
the wliole must iook in Hoimes's " Auto- 
crat of the Brealctast Table " for it. 
In candent ire the solar splendor flames ; 
The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames ; 
His humid front tho cive, anheliiig, wipes, 
And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes." 
This is splendid. At first it looks like 
one of the poems out of " Alice in Woii- 
derland " : 
" 'Twas brillig and the slithy toves," etc., 
but when looked at more carefully it will 
be seen that the peculiarity consists in 
treating Latin. words as Etigiisli ones, not 
mixing tlie two together, as in the ordin- 
;M-y macaronic. 
To finish with, we will have a few genu- 
ine pieces of translation by juvenile crim- 
uia,ls— criminals in a literary sense only. 
Tiiere is a well-known sentence in Henry's 
Latin boolc, which runs, "SagitUieab hu- 
niero pependerent." "Pro causa troub- ' 
lam savendi," as " Punch " puts it, a boy 
treated "sagittae" as a proper name, 
with this result, " They hung Sagitta by 
his shoulder." 
I have in my possession a recent num- 
ber of tlie "F — - School Magazine" (I 
will be merciful, and not give the full 
title). The lower school has evidently 
been at work on Virgil, with the follow- 
ing results, as shown in examination 
papers :— 
" Parvam te roscida mala vidi cum 
matre legentem " (Buc. viii. 38). 
This was translated, " I have seen you, 
a not large girl, reading api)les with your 
mother." 
There is no doubt that this is terribly 
funny, but I can't help being rather 
angry with the boy who has so bur- 
lesqued one of the exquisite passages of 
the Bucolics. " Gathering the dewy ap- 
ples " turned into " reading apples." O 
shade of Virgil ! 
" Frigus Captabis opacum "— " You 
will catch a lieavy cold." Tliose who re- 
member that the passage begins " O for- 
tunate senex!" will appreciate the ex- 
quisite fitness of the transla.tion. 
" Flumine libant, summa leves " (Georg. 
iv. 54-5). Tlie Editor of the magazine re- 
marks, "The last two words were given 
with the peculiarly felicitous translation 
of 'summer leaves.'" I hope, by the 
way, that the examination papers did not 
contain the same errors as the magazine, 
or I could almost forgive the boys who 
failed to make sense of the passages. 
"Oviscus tos " for " Oves custos " is 
enough to put a scholar out, not to men- 
tion a boy who is capable of writing " red 
with the scarlet berries of the ivory," or 
"the strange sheep milks its guardian 
twice an hour." 
Famous Popular Songs. 
ULD LANG SYNE" is popu- 
larly supposed io be the com- 
position of Burns ; but, in fact, 
he wrote only the second and 
Liiini verses of the ballad as commonly 
suiig, retouching the others from an older 
and less familiar song. " The Old Oaken 
Bucket "was written by Wood worth in 
New York city during the hot summer of 
1817. He canie into the house and drank 
a glass of water, and then said, " How 
much more refreshing it would be to take 
a good long diink from the old oaken 
bucket that used to liang in my father's 
well." His wife suggested that it wa,s a 
har)py thought for a poem. He sat doAvn 
and wrote the song as we have it. 
" Woodman, Spare that Tree!" was tlie 
result of an incident that hap[)ei]ed to 
George P. Morris. A friend's mother 
had owned a little place in the country, 
which she was obliged from poverty to 
sell. On the property grew a large oalc, 
which had been planted by his grand- 
father. The i)urchaser of the house and 
la.nd proposed to cut down the tree, and 
Morris' friend paid him $10 for a bond 
that the oak should be Si)are(1. Morris 
heard the story, saw the tree, and wrote 
the song. " Oft in the Stilly Night " was 
produced by Moore after his family had 
undergone apparently every possible mis- 
fortune. One of his children died young, 
another went astray, and a third was ac- 
cidentally killed. "The Light of Olher 
Days" was written to be introduced into 
Baife's opera, "The Maid of Artois." 
The opera is forgotten, but the song still 
lives, and is as popular as nver. 
Payne wrote "Home, Sweet Home," 
to help fill up a,n opera he was preparing, 
and at first it had four stanzas. Tlie 
author never received anything for it; 
but, thotigh the opera was a failure when 
played in the Covent Garden Theatre, the 
song took, and over one hundred thou- 
sand copies were sold the first year. In 
two years, the publishers cleared over 
$10,000 by the publication ; and the varia- 
tions, transcriptions, and imitations have 
been innumerable. The melody is be- 
lieved to be a Sicilian air, a,nd Donizetti 
has a variation of it in his opera Anna 
