But when did such risk hinder boys or men from
short cuts and pleasant paths?
Now in the study that night Tom was the upholder of the traditionary
method of vulgus doing. He carefully produced two large vulgus-books,
and began diving into them, and picking out a line here, and an ending
there (tags, as they were vulgarly called), till he had gotten all
that he thought he could make fit. He then proceeded to patch his tags
together with the help of his Gradus, producing an incongruous and
feeble result of eight elegiac lines, the minimum quantity for his form,
and finishing up with two highly moral lines extra, making ten in
all, which he cribbed entire from one of his books, beginning "O genus
humanum," and which he himself must have used a dozen times before,
whenever an unfortunate or wicked hero, of whatever nation or language
under the sun, was the subject. Indeed he began to have great doubts
whether the master wouldn't remember them, and so only throw them in as
extra lines, because in any case they would call off attention from the
other tags, and if detected, being extra lines, he wouldn't be sent back
to do more in their place, while if they passed muster again he would
get marks for them.
The second method, pursued by Martin, may be called the dogged or
prosaic method. He, no more than Tom, took any pleasure in the task,
but having no old vulgus-books of his own, or any one's else, could
not follow the traditionary method, for which too, as Tom remarked, he
hadn't the genius.
Pages:
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283