Here is a monstrous quantity of work to throw upon any two words in any possible language. Even Shakspere's clown,[9] when challenged to furnish a catholic answer applicable to all conceivable occasions, cannot do it in less than nine letters--namely, _Oh lord, sir_. I, for my part, satisfied that the existing form of _Heu taceo_ was mere indictable and punishable nonsense, but yet that this nonsense must enter as chief element into the stinging sense of Lamia, gazed for I cannot tell how many weeks at these impregnable letters, viewing them sometimes as a fortress that I was called upon to escalade, sometimes as an anagram that I was called upon to re-organise into the life which it had lost through some dislocation of arrangement. Finally the result in which I landed, and which fulfilled all the conditions laid down was this:--Let me premise, however, what _at any rate_ the existing darkness attests, that some disturbance of the text must in some way have arisen; whether from the gnawing of a rat, or the spilling of some obliterating fluid at this point of some critical or unique MS. It is sufficient for us that the vital word has survived. I suppose, therefore, that Lamia had replied to the friend who praised the sweetness of his voice, 'Sweet is it? Ah, would to Heaven it might prove Orpheutic.' Ominous in this case would be the word Orpheutic to the ears of Domitian: for every school-boy knows that this means a _wife-revoking voice_. But first let me remark that there is such a legitimate word as _Orpheutaceam_: and in that case the Latin repartee of Lamia would stand thus--_Suavem dixisti? Quam vellem et Orpheutaceam_. But, perhaps, reader, you fail to recognise in this form our old friend _Heu taceo_. But here he is to a certainty, in spite of the rat: and in a different form of letters the compositor will show him, up to you as--_vellem et Orp_. [HEU TACEAM]. Possibly, being in good humour, you will be disposed to wink at the seemingly surreptitious AM, though believing the real word to be _taceo_. Let me say, therefore, that one reading, I believe, gives _taceam_. Here, then, shines out at once--(1) Eurydice the lovely wife; (2) detained by the gloomy tyrant Pluto; (3) who, however, is forced into surrendering her to her husband, whose voice (the sweetest ever known) drew stocks and stones to follow him, and finally his wife; (4) the word Orpheutic involves an alarming threat, showing that the hope of recovering the lady still survived; (5) we have involved in the restoration all the eight, or perhaps nine, letters of the erroneous form. [9] In _All's Well that Ends Well_. HOW TO WRITE ENGLISH.[10]