the game and carried it into the provincial press. Then country
clergymen bustled up and tried to recall the exact rendering; while
others who had never heard of the epigram waxed emulous and produced
translations of their own, with the Latin of which the local
compositor made sport after his kind. For weeks there continued quite
a pretty rivalry among these decaying scholars.

The gentle thunders of this controversy had scarcely died down when
the _Times_ quoted a four-lined epigram about Mr. Leech making a
speech, and Mr. Parker making something darker that was dark enough
without; and another respectable profession, which hitherto had
remained cold, began to take fire and dispute with ardor. The Church,
the Legislature, the Bar, were all excited by this time. They strained
on the verge of surpassing feats, should the occasion be given. From
men in this mood the occasion is rarely withheld. Lord Tennyson died.
He had written at Cambridge a prize poem on Timbuctoo. Somebody else,
at Cambridge or elsewhere, had also written about Timbuctoo and a
Cassowary that ate a missionary with his this and his that and his
hymn-book too. Who was this somebody? Did he write it at Cambridge
(home of poets)? And what were the "trimmings," as Mr. Job Trotter
would say, with which the missionary was eaten?

Poetry was in the air by this time. It would seem that those treasures
which the great Laureate had kept close were by his death unlocked and
spread over England, even to the most unexpected corners. "All have
got the seed," and already a dozen gentlemen were busily growing the
flower in the daily papers. It was not to be expected that our
senators, barristers, stockbrokers, having proved their strength,
would stop short at Timbuctoo and the Cassowary. Very soon a bold
egregious wether jumped the fence into the Higher Criticism, and gave