6

puKcigirtig long and short. On another occasion my friend Mr.Wilson, of Peterhouse , (afterwards one of the best black-letterjudges in England,) having kept under me a very good actin the divinity schools, was censured by two great classics,Bishop of Peterborough and Dr. Symonds, for having readabolita instead of, as they thought, abolita. Even the verylearned Mr. Bryant, with whom I was conversing in 1802, on thesubject of man’s redemption, spoke of Jesus as the pstrtrtjs of thenew covenant; on my expressing a doubt as to the quantity ofthe middle syllable, he said no more; but on his going to Eton (that noble mart of metre) he sent me word that it ought to bepronounced f&eririis from its analogy to odlrqg, for which he hadfound authority. Had my father’s faculties remained unimpairedtill I had been sent to the University , it is probable that I shouldhave had no occasion to lament a defective education in pro-sody, for he was esteemed an excellent grammarian, and inhis time boys were prepared for the University , by beingtaught at school to converse in Latin . I once overheard anold man who had been his scholar say in a passion, to his

fellow-labourer, Frangam tibi caput -but enough of such things :

from not being used to them in my youth, I may think of themwith less respect than I ought. My father died in November,1753, and had been afflicted much with a palsy for several yearsbefore. I have heard him ask twenty times in a day, what is thename of the lad that is at College ? (my elder brother;) and yethe was able to repeat, without a blunder, hundreds of lines outof classic authors. This reminiscence of ideas, formerly impressedon the brain, and forgetfulness of recent ones, is no unusual cir-cumstance attending a paralysis, though our physiology is not yet