So much for the prize-taker; the prize-loser vented his spleen as thus:—­

    “Bright was the doom that diddled Mungo Park,
    Yet very palpably obscure and dark. 
    Long burned his throat, for want of coming nigh
    That stream he long’d and pray’d for wistfully,
    Whose course, ’tis said, that no one can tell where
    It flows eternal; guessing isn’t fair. 
    Though miles a thousand had he tramp’d along,
    And all, save him, were sure that path was wrong,
    Still hope prophetic poured the ardent prayer
    He’d find that stream,—­if it was anywhere! 
    That prayer was heard, of course, though no one knows
    Where this said Niger never flowed, or flows;
    All that is known is, that a dreamer stood
    In speechless transport by a mystic flood,
    And after fixing on’t his glistening eyes,
    The sun goes down, and so the dreamer dies!”

For the fourth promised specimen, the best excuse is that Garbet really did utter the words quoted,—­and the answer he received about love is exact, and became famous:—­

    “’Didst e’er read Dante!’—­Never.  ’Cruel man! 
    Take, take him, Williams,—­I—­I never can.’”

N.B.—­Williams was the other examiner.  Garbet went on with a further question nevertheless,—­as he was affectedly fond of Italian:—­

    “’Dost know the language love delights in most? 
    If thou dost not, thy character is lost.’ 
    ’Yes, sir!’—­the youth retorts with just surprise,
    ‘Love’s language is the language of the eyes!’”

In those days, as perhaps also in these, like Pope, “I spake in numbers,” verse being almost—­well, not quite—­easier than prose.  In fact, some of my critics have heretofore to my disparagement stumbled on the printed truth that he is little better than an improvisatore in rhyme.  And this word “rhyme” reminds me now of a very curious question I raised some years after my Oxford days in more than one magazine article, as to when rhyme was invented, and by whom:  the conclusion being that intoning monks found out how easily the cases of Latin nouns and tenses of verbs, &c., jingled with each other, and that troubadours and trouveres carried thus the seeds of song all over Europe in about the ninth century, until which time rhythm was the only recognised form of versification, rhyme having strangely escaped discovery for more than four thousand years.  Is it not a marvel (and another marvel that no one noticed it before) that not one of the old poets, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and I think Sanscrit, Arabic, and Celtic too, ever (except by manifest accident, now intentionally ignored) stumbled upon the good idea of terminating their metres with rhyme?  Where is there any ode of Horace, or Anacreon,—­where any psalm of David; any epigram of Martial, any heroic verse of Virgil, or philosophic argument of Lucretius,—­decorated, enlivened, and brightened by the now only too frequent ornament of rhyme?