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"Merses profundo, pulchrior evenit." He had many friends and a great reputation; they brought him various preferments, the lectureship at Gray's Inn, the vicarage of St Lawrence Jewry, and the Deanery of Ripon, within a few years after his banishment from Cambridge.

"Goethe was with us," so writes Heinse to one of his friends; "a beautiful youth of twenty-five, full of genius and force from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot; a heart full of feeling, a spirit full of fire, who with eagle wings ruit immensus ore profundo."

His communicator spouted voices whose tones ranged from basso profundo to high tenor, and whose ideas of proper astrogation seemed to vary more widely still. "You there!" boomed a voice with deafening volume. "You're in our clear-space! Sheer off!" The volume of a signal in space varies as the square of the distance. This voice was thunderous.

Basso profundo is the lowest bass; basso cantante is a flexible bass usually unable to sing quite as low as basso profundo; baritone is the highest bass a voice midway between bass and tenor and partaking somewhat of the quality of both.

'But, cried the delighted captain, 'you address me in the tones of a basso profundo! It is absurd. Do you suppose that I am to be deceived by your artifice? rogue that you are! Don't I know you are a woman? a sweet, an ecstatic, a darling little woman! He laughed. She shivered to hear the solitary echoes.

'But, cried the delighted captain, 'you address me in the tones of a basso profundo! It is absurd. Do you suppose that I am to be deceived by your artifice? rogue that you are! Don't I know you are a woman? a sweet, an ecstatic, a darling little woman! He laughed. She shivered to hear the solitary echoes.

"And so I turned, canny for my years, from the professors to the poets, listening to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of Shelley, to Shakespeare with his first bass and his fine range, to Tennyson with his second bass and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and Marlow, bassos profundo. I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron declaiming, and Wordsworth droning.

He would begin, for example, on a very high note, shouting: "Look here! A real! Only one real! Ladies' and gents' hosiery at a real a pair! Look-a-here now! A real a pair!" Then, lowering his register, he would continue, gravely: "A nice Bayonne waistcoat. A splendid bargain!" And as a finale, he would add in a basso profundo: "Only twenty pesetas!"

We know about the row the Baptists are having to get rid of the bass singer in their choir, who has sung at funerals for thirty years, until it has reached a point where all good Baptists dread death on account of his lugubrious profundo.

I wonder if there are any such beings nowadays as the great Eliphalet, with his large features and conversational basso profundo, seemed to me. His very name had something elephantine about it, and it seemed to me that the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall.