the lame lines inscribed upon his gift, than that they were put together by 'the tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,' who had grown grey in teaching boys to make Latin verses. Recollections after a lapse of forty years, touching the infirmities of former schoolmasters, should be regarded with suspicion, even when they proceed from habitually careful narrators. But when a gentleman of almost proverbial inaccuracy entertains the world with irreconcilable reminiscences of the same individual, he may be regarded as labouring for a moment under the besetting infirmity, that always weakens Mr. Medwin's testimony, and sometimes deprives it of all value. That the successful schoolmaster (bound alike by his interest and the obligations of his office to be mindful of the proprieties) disgusted little Bysshe, and delighted the rest of the class with obscene jocosity in reference to a familiar passage of the _Æneid_, is less probable than that Tom Medwin's memory betrayed him. It is easier to believe that in a mood of unusual irritability and dullness Dr. Greenlaw discovered execrable Latinity in the Ovidian lines: 'Me miserum! quanti montes volvuntur aquarum! Jam, jam tacturas sidera summa putes,'-- which little Bysshe 'gave in' as verses of his own manufacture. '_Jam, jam!_' the Doctor is said to have exclaimed during the course of animadversions that were emphasized with slaps administered to the child's small cheeks and ears. '_Jam, jam!_ Pooh, pooh, boy! raspberry jam! Do you think you are at your mother's? Don't you know that I have a sovereign objection to those two monosyllables, with which schoolboys cram their verses? haven't I told you so a hundred times already? "_Tacturas sidera summa putes_,"--what, do the waves on the coast of Sussex strike the stars, eh?--"_summa sidera_,"--who does not know that the stars are high? Where did you find that epithet?--in your _Gradus ad Parnassum_, I suppose. You will never mount so high. "_Putes!_" you may think this very fine, but to me it is all balderdash, hyperbolical stuff. There' (with a final box on the little fellow's nearest ear), 'go now, sir, and see if you can't write something better!' It is consolatory to reflect that, though he should not have been cuffed and exposed to the riotous ridicule of his school-fellows for writing Latin verses as badly as Ovid wrote them, the culprit merited some kind of punishment for 'giving in' as his own the verses that were not his own,--an act of deception common enough with schoolboys, but scarcely reconcilable with the severe truthfulness, which is said (by the Shelleyan enthusiasts) to have distinguished him from his childhood to his last hour. 'He was,' says Lady Shelley in her _Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources_, 'more outspoken and truth-loving than other boys.'