The latter jest, therefore, when once apprehended, speaks broadly and bitingly for itself. But the other--what can it possibly mean? For centuries has that question been reiterated; and hitherto without advancing by one step nearer to solution. Isaac Casaubon, who about 230 years since was the leading oracle in this field of literature, writing an elaborate and continuous commentary upon Suetonius, found himself unable to suggest any real aids for dispersing the thick darkness overhanging the passage. What he says is this:--'Parum satisfaciunt mihi interpretes in explicatione hujus Lamiae dicti. Nam quod putant _Heu taceo_ suspirium esse ejus--indicem doloris ob abductam uxorem magni sed latentis, nobis non ita videtur; sed notatam potius fuisse tyrannidem principis, qui omnia in suo genere pulchra et excellentia possessoribus eriperet, unde necessitas incumbebat sua bona dissimulandi celandique.' Not at all satisfactory to me are the commentators in the explanation of the _dictum_ (which is here equivalent to _dicterium_) of Lamia. For, whereas they imagine _Heu taceo_ to be a sigh of his--the record and indication of a sorrow, great though concealed, on behalf of the wife that had been violently torn away from him--me, I confess, that the case does not strike in that light; but rather that a satiric blow was aimed at the despotism of the sovereign prince, who tore away from their possessors all objects whatsoever marked by beauty or distinguished merit in their own peculiar class: whence arose a pressure of necessity for dissembling and hiding their own advantages. '_Sic esse exponendum_,' that such is the true interpretation (continues Casaubon), '_docent illa verba_ [LAUDANTI VOCEM SUAM],' (we are instructed by those words), [to one who praised his singing voice, &c.]. This commentary was obscure enough, and did no honour to the native good sense of Isaac Casaubon, usually so conspicuous. For, whilst proclaiming a settlement, in reality it settled nothing. Naturally, it made but a feeble impression upon the scholars of the day; and not long after the publication of the book, Casaubon received from Joseph Scaliger a friendly but gasconading letter, in which that great scholar brought forward a new reading--namely, [Greek: entakto], to which he assigned a profound technical value as a musical term. No person even affected to understand Scaliger. Casaubon himself, while treating so celebrated a man with kind and considerate deference, yet frankly owned that, in all his vast reading, he had never met with this strange Greek word. But, without entering into any dispute upon that verbal question, and conceding to Scaliger the word and his own interpretation of the word, no man could understand in what way this new resource was meant to affect the ultimate question at issue--namely, the extrication of the passage from that thick darkness which overshadowed it.