That, at any rate, is my condition at this moment after going through a course of them.  I notice that the reviewers have been a little shy of these hexametric efforts.  They have mostly described them as “interesting experiments” and have applauded Dr. BRIDGES for his adventurous industry and his careful scholarship, and thereafter they have skirmished on the outskirts and have shown a disinclination to come to grips with the LAUREATE on the main question whether these hexameters are a success or a failure.  Now I have no hesitation whatever in admitting my metrical ignorance and at the same time in denouncing as a fiasco the experiment of Dr. BRIDGES.  I have spent some time in struggling with his hexameters; I have attempted to track his dactyls to their lair; I have followed up what I took to be his spondees, and I am thankful to say that I have managed to survive.

Let me now give some examples, not composed, it is true, by the LAUREATE, but by myself.  This is not an unfair proceeding, for it will serve to show the effect of Ibant Obscuri on a mind not too obtuse.  I promise that the rules shall be observed.  There shall be six feet in each line, dactyls or spondees, and the fifth foot shall be a dactyl and the sixth a spondee or a trochee.  Are you ready?  Go!

  Apollo now came forth his course through the sky to fulfil;
  In other words it was morning and most people got out of bed;
  And fathers of families munched and grumbled at their breakfasts,
  Denouncing their bacon and not to be mollified with their
  Coffee or tea, as the case might be, and the housewives reproved them,
  Saying ’twas impossible to control them with such an example.

Beyond the above I cannot go, but I must add that the lines are of the most perfect metrical lucidity and the purest melody when compared with some written by the LAUREATE in Ibant Obscuri.

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)

Mr. H.G.  WELLS also among the New Theologians is not an entirely unexpected event.  We have all had intimation in his later writings of the coming of some such thesis as God, The Invisible King (CASSELL).  I can see the deans making mincemeat of the rash author.  All’s well if they’ll eat some of the meat.  And they may.  At least this is no super-subtle modernist divine dealing out old coins surreptitiously stamped with a new image and superscription, but a plain blunt heretic who knows his mind (or, rather, mood).  But it is a reverent, indeed, I dare to say, a noble book.  The sanely and securely orthodox may read it with profit if with shock.  It should brace their faith, and will rob them of nothing but a too-ready doubt that so forthright a house-breaker may be a builder in his own way.  There is indeed more faith in these honest denials than in half the assents of the conformists.  Just because it is not a subtle