“When I was sixteen, I fell upon an article in the _Quarterly_, which reviewed a Latin history of (I think) the Rebellion of 1715; perhaps by Dr. Whitaker. Years afterwards I learned that the critique was the writing of a celebrated Oxford scholar; but at the time, it was the subject itself, not the writer, that took hold of me. I read it carefully, and made extracts which, I believe, I have to this day. Had I known more of Latin writing, it would have been of real use to me; but as it was concerned of necessity in verbal criticisms, it did but lead me deeper into the mistake to which I had already been introduced,—that Latinity consisted in using good phrases. Accordingly I began noting down, and using in my exercises, idiomatic or peculiar expressions: such as ‘oleum perdidi,’ ‘haud scio an non,’ ‘cogitanti mihi,’ ‘verum enimvero,’ ‘equidem,’ ‘dixerim,’ and the like; and I made a great point of putting the verb at the end of the sentence. What took me in the same direction was Dumesnil’s Synonymes, a good book, but one which does not even profess to teach Latin writing. I was aiming to be an architect by learning to make bricks. “Then I fell in with the _Germania_ and _Agricola_ of Tacitus, and was very much taken by his style. Its peculiarities were much easier to understand, and to copy, than Cicero’s: ‘decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile;’ and thus, without any advance whatever in understanding the genius of the language, or the construction of a Latin sentence, I added to my fine words and cut-and-dried idioms, phrases smacking of Tacitus. The Dialogues of Erasmus, which I studied, carried me in the same direction; for dialogues, from the nature of the case, consist of words and clauses, and smart, pregnant, or colloquial expressions, rather than of sentences with an adequate structure.” Mr. Black takes breath, and then continues: