'As to beauties,' said he, 'I wrote as well as I could, and aimed at securing the attention and gratification of my auditors, and at nothing more. But allow me to see what you regard as '_my beauties_.' I then read to him one of those rich and masterly notes, in which B---- has so finely brought out the hidden sense of the poet. He thought a moment, and then, with a smile, replied: 'Well, that is helping me out finely! I am sure I never thought of such a construction as possible, but it is very good.' To my utter astonishment, he treated several of those ingenious elucidations in the same manner. I then pointed him to one of the important conjectural emendations of the text, as a specimen of modern scholarship. 'What!' said the wondering dramatist, 'you have mistaken: surely, this is not in my writings; whose is it? I hardly see what the passage itself can mean.' I then showed him that it was a part of 'Prometheus Vinctus.' 'Oh!' he exclaimed, 'I now understand; you have copied it wrong.' 'My astonishment interrupted my dream, and awoke me. Dreams are nothing, to be sure; but how could my mind run into such a fiction?' 'You are right in saying that dreams are not to guide our conduct: but may it not be, that some of your nocturnal suppositions come close upon the truth?' 'Oh no! I should as soon expect to catch Wolf tripping in Homer, as to find any such suppositions correct. I can easily account for my discouraging dream. I had been laboring the whole day upon a passage, of which the original was not indeed controverted, but the sense is given by two learned commentators in direct opposition to each other. One of them, after giving his rendering, says: '_Sensus cuique obvius est_.' The other says of this interpretation: '_A genio linguæ Græcæ prorsus abhorret_.' But this difference between scholars shows only how wide is the field for investigation.'