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The twelve 'pueri' had been our guests at dinner, and were in the garden singing merry rounds well known to us, and I joined in, with Ann and Ursula Tetzel.

The demon of vanity is, assuredly, a very subtle one, and I ask myself whether perchance I have fallen a victim to it. If men of taste reproach me with having shown myself to be a true representative of the age while pretending not to be so, I beg them to rest well assured that this will not happen to me again. Claudite jam rivos, pueri; sat prata biberunt

In Charlemagne's time, the revolution is complete. Popular assemblies and popular election entirely vanish. Military, civil, and judicial officers-dukes, earls, margraves, and others are all king's creatures, 'knegton des konings, pueri regis', and so remain, till they abjure the creative power, and set up their own.

For albeit the cutting the hair be a thing in itself indifferent, yet because the Gentiles did use it superstitiously, therefore, saith Calvin, albeit it was per se medium, Deus tamen noluit populo suo liberum esse, ut tanquam pueri discerent ex parvis rudimentis, se non aliter Deo fore gratos, nisi exteris et proeputiatis essent prorsus dissimiles, ac longissime abessent ab eorum exemplis, praesertim vero ritus omnes fugerent, quibus testata fuerit religio.

Once, at least, he was himself conscious of the fatiguing effect on my temper of this insistency, for, raising his great brown eyes with a flash of laughter in them, he closed the Bible suddenly after a very lengthy disquisition, and quoted his Virgil to startling effect: Claudite jam rivos, pueri: Sat prata biberunt.

This was Lorenz Abenberger, the apothecary's son, erewhile a companion of Herdegen in his youth, and he who, after he had beguiled the other pueri to dig for treasure, had been turned out of the school.

But ere long her father came to fetch her, and so soon as she had departed, beaming, with her roses, Herdegen hastily came to me and, without deeming Ann worthy to be looked at even, bid me good even. I held his hand and called to her to come to me, to help me hinder him from departing, inasmuch as one of the pueri was about to play the lute for the rest to dance.

Dr Johnson said, 'A wind, or not a wind? that is the question'; for he can amuse himself at times with a little play of words, or rather sentences. I remember when he turned his cup at Aberbrothick, where we drank tea, he muttered, Claudite jam rivos, pueri. I must again and again apologize to fastidious readers, for recording such minute particulars.

"O cleric!" said he, "do you know this expression which I have in commemoration i.e., 'Hibernenses omnes clamant ad te pueri, etc. which two girls uttered in their mother's womb in our country?"

Such was now the rage for poetical composition in the Roman capital, that Horace describes it in the following terms: Mutavit mentem populus levis, et calet uno Scribendi studio: pueri patresque severi Fronde comas vincti coenant, et carmina dictant. Epist. ii. 1.