The Corpus Professor of Latin, old Robinson Ellis, and I saw subsequently (perhaps drawn together by the loss of our common friend) a good deal of one another. At "meat tea," a meal he dearly loved, we used to sit long together, and talk classics, the only subject in which he seemed in the least interested. I wish I had noted down all the odd bits of erudition with which he used to entertain me. Cicero's last words, he said (I cannot imagine on what authority) were "Causa causarum, miserere mei!"[12] A curious story (perhaps mediæval) of Ovid was of how two monks visited his tomb, and in gratitude for the noble line--the best, in his own opinion, that he had ever written--"Virtus est licitis abstinuisse bonis," began reciting Paters and Aves for his soul. The poet's spirit, unhappily, {87} was unappreciative of their charity; and a voice was heard from the tomb declaiming the irreverent pentameter: "Nolo Paternoster: carpe, viator, iter!" The professor told me that in his opinion the best elegiac couplet ever written in English was: "Three Patagonian apes with their arms extended akimbo: Three on a rock were they--seedy, but happy withal." He said that one of Dr. Johnson's acutest literary criticisms was his remark that Tacitus seemed rather to have made notes for a historical work than to have written a history. The word "jour," he pointed out to me, was derived from "dies" (though every single letter was different) through the Italian--"dies, diurnus, giorno, jour." He asked if I could tell him the authorship of the striking couplet-- "Mors mortis! morti mortem nisi morte dedisses, Æternae vitæ janua clausa foret." This I was unable to do: on the other hand, I evoked a chuckle (whimsical etymologies always pleased him) by telling him how a fifteenth-century writer[13] had rendered the "Royal Collegiate Church of Windsor" into Latin as "Collegium Domini Regis de _Ventomorbido_!"