suffer a few months of unaudited accounts, or of unanswered letters, to accumulate; and a mountain of arrears is before you which years seem insufficient to get rid of. This sort of accumulation arises in the shape of _arrears_: but any accumulation of trouble out of its proper place,--_i. e._ of a distributed trouble into a state of convergement,--no matter whether in the shape of needless anticipation or needless procrastination, has equally the practical effect of converting a light trouble (or none at all) into a heavy and hateful one. The daily experience of books, actual intercourse with Latin authors, is sufficient to teach all the irregularities of that language: just as the daily experience of an English child leads him without trouble into all the anomalies of his own language. And, to return to the question which we put--'What was our profit from all this loathsome labour?' In this way it was, viz. in the way of actual experience that we, the reviewer of this book, did actually in the end come to the knowledge of those irregularities which the three elegant poems in question profess to communicate. Mark this, reader: the logic of what we are saying--is first, that, if they _did_ teach what they profess, they would attain that end by an artificial means far more laborious than the natural means: and secondly, that in fact they do _not_ attain their end. The reason of this--is partly the perplexed and barbarous texture of the verse, which for metrical purposes, _i. e._ to keep the promise of metre to the mere technical scansion, is obliged to abandon all those natural beauties of metre in the fluent connection of the words, in the rhythmus, cadence, caesura, &c. which alone recommend metre as a better or more rememberable form for conveying knowledge than prose: prose, if it has no music, at any rate does not compel the most inartificial writer to dislocate, and distort it into non-intelligibility. Another reason is, that '_As in praesenti_' and its companions, are not so much adapted to the reading as to the writing of Latin. For instance, I remember (we will suppose) this sequence of '_tango tetigi_' from the '_As in P_.' Now, if I am _reading_ Latin I meet either with the tense '_tango_,' or the tense '_tetigi_.' In the former case, I have no difficulty; for there is as yet no irregularity: and therefore it is impertinent to offer assistance: in the latter case I _do_ find a difficulty, for, according to the models of verbs which I have learned in my grammar, there is no possible verb which could yield _tetigi_: for such a verb as _tetigo_ even ought to yield _tetixi_: here therefore I should be glad of some assistance; but just here it is that I obtain none: for, because I remember '_tango tetigi_' in the direct order, it is quite contrary to the laws of association which govern the memory in such a case, to suppose that I remember the inverted order of _tetigi tango_--any more than the forward repetition of the Lord's prayer