His mind was filled with a vast deal of knowledge of a recondite sort. It could have been of no possible service to anybody, least of all to himself. Yet he moved lightly and easily from one antediluvian topic to others more antediluvian still. He was armed with a great array of theories of no moment at all, and a matchless sheaf of facts that proved and disproved and proved them over again. How weary we became! How we fidgeted and looked at one another in our despair, for he grew more minute as he proceeded, and called up, extempore, authority upon authority to show that Lais was a woman of virtue, and that Virgil did not write his own works. He split straws with Aristotle, and picked holes in his Ethics. He said that Cicero was a windbag, and that Plato was a dunce. He said that Herodotus was loose in his facts, and no more worthy of credence than Plutarch, and that Plutarch was not a whit better than Herodotus neither. He said that Homer was the biggest impostor in history. He had nothing to do with the _Iliad_, whilst as for the _Odyssey_, he had long come at the truth that it was by a female hand, most probably one of the Hesperides, though to be sure he had not quite satisfied himself as to which, just as the plays of the poet Shakespeare would one day be allowed to be the handiwork of Lord Bacon, the eminent lawyer and philosopher; and again, as the world, purblind as it was, would one day discover that Mr. Fielding's so-called novel of _Joseph Andrews_ had sprung from the fertile brain of Mr. Colley Gibber. Indeed I was so fearful lest he should take steps to disprove my grandfather's claims to have produced his celebrated Commentary on the _Analects of Confucius_, that I became quite desperate, and determined to put a stop to the unceasing current of his talk, even at the risk of making a hole in my good manners. Having reached a point in his discourse wherein he showed that Cæsar did not cross the Rubicon, I slapped my hand on the table with a vigour that knocked down half-a-score of tomes and startled everything and everybody but the speaker himself; and, says I, at the top of my heartiest voice: "I quite agree with you there, sir; I do indeed." "I presume, sir," says the parson, "you know the authorities there are against us, and what adversaries of weight, Cæsar himself, Suetonius, and Plutarch, to name only three, that we have to face." "I care not if there are three thousand," says I valiantly, "in this matter I am entirely of your mind." The parson, whose simplicity was as great as his learning, grasped my hand with the utmost fervour. "My dear sir," says he, "I can never sufficiently extol your spirit. It is excellently said, sir, excellently said. Would that there were more persons like you in the world. I can but offer you some gooseberry-wine and a piece of Banbury cake, but I am sure you are very welcome. I do declare that Blodgett has forgotten them; I will go and see about them myself."