Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/98

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UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

How many names he may have on hand it might not be so easy to resolve: nor which of these, if any, may be genuine; but for the three letters he need look no further than his Latin dictionary; if such a reference be not something more than superfluous for a writer of "epiludes" who renders "domus exilis Plutonia" by "a Plutonian house of exiles:" a version not properly to be criticized in any school" by simple application of goose-quill to paper.[1] The disciple on whom «*the deep delicious stream of the Latinity" of Petronius has made such an impression that he finds also a deep delicious morality in the pure and sincere pages of a book from which less pure-minded readers and writers less sincere than himself are compelled to turn

  1. I am reminded here of another contemporary somewhat more notorious than this classic namesake and successor of George Buchanan, but like him a man of many and questionable names, who lately had occasion, while figuring on a more public stage than that of literature, to translate the words "Laus Deo semper" by "The laws of God for ever." It must evidently be from the same source that Mr. Buchanan and the Tichborne claimant have drawn their first and last draught of "the humanities." Fellow-students, whether at Stonyhurst or elsewhere, they ought certainly to have been. Can it be the rankling recollection of some boyish quarrel in which he came by the worst of it that keeps alive in the noble soul of Mr. Buchanan a dislike of "fleshly persons?" The result would be worthy of such a "fons et origo mali"—a phrase, I may add for the benefit of such scholars, which is not adequately or exactly rendered by "the fount of original sin." Perhaps some day we may be gratified—but let us hope without any necessary intervention of lawyers—by some further discovery of the early associations which may

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