“Has Oxford lost all her Latin?  Here is no capitani filius; no more mention of family than a Welchman would have allowed him; no hic jacet; and, worse than all, the devil a tittle of spe redemptionis, or anno Domini.”

“Willy!” quoth Sir Thomas, “I shrewdly do suspect there was more, and that thou hast forgotten it.”

“Sir!” answered Willy, “I wrote not down the words, fearing to mis-spell them, and begged them of the doctor, when I took my leave of him on the morrow; and verily he wrote down all he had repeated.  I keep them always in the tin-box in my waistcoat-pocket, among the eel-hooks, on a scrap of paper a finger’s length and breadth, folded in the middle to fit.  And when the eels are running, I often take it out and read it before I am aware.  I could as soon forget my own epitaph as this.”

“Simpleton!” said Sir Thomas, with his gentle, compassionate smile; “but thou hast cleared thyself.”

Sir Silas.

“I think the doctor gave one idle chap as much solid pudding as he could digest, with a slice to spare for another.”

William Shakspeare.

“And yet after this pudding the doctor gave him a spoonful of custard, flavoured with a little bitter, which was mostly left at the bottom for the other idle chap.”

Sir Thomas not only did endure this very goodnaturedly, but deigned even to take in good part the smile upon my countenance, as though he were a smile collector, and as though his estate were so humble that he could hold his laced bonnet (in all his bravery) for bear and fiddle.

He then said unto Willy,

“Place likewise this custard before us.”

“There is but little of it; the platter is shallow,” replied he; “’t was suited to Master Ethelbert’s appetite.  The contents were these: 

“’The things whereon thy whole soul brooded in its innermost recesses, and with all its warmth and energy, will pass unprized and unregarded, not only throughout thy lifetime but long after.  For the higher beauties of poetry are beyond the capacity, beyond the vision of almost all.  Once perhaps in half a century a single star is discovered, then named and registered, then mentioned by five studious men to five more; at last some twenty say, or repeat in writing, what they have heard about it.  Other stars await other discoveries.  Few and solitary and wide asunder are those who calculate their relative distances, their mysterious influences, their glorious magnitude, and their stupendous height.  ’T is so, believe me, and ever was so, with the truest and best poetry.  Homer, they say, was blind; he might have been ere he died,—­that he sat among the blind, we are sure.

“’Happy they who, like this young lad from Stratford, write poetry on the saddle-bow when their geldings are jaded, and keep the desk for better purposes.’

“The young gentlemen, like the elderly, all turned their faces toward me, to my confusion, so much did I remark of sneer and scoff at my cost.  Master Ethelbert was the only one who spared me.  He smiled and said, —