But those were times when, to forget an evil world, grammarians took pleasure in abstruse questions. I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of ‘ego,’ and in the end they attacked each other, with weapons.

At all events it quite satisfied what he called his conscience.

Perhaps it’s a good thing, Traddles,“ said I, "to have an unsound hobby ridden hard; for it’s the sooner ridden to death.

It is the moment,” Jorge was now saying, “when everything will fall into lawlessness, sons will raise their hands against fathers, wives will plot against husbands, husbands will bring wives to law, masters will be inhuman to servants and servants will disobey their masters, there will be no more respect for the old, the young will demand to rule, work will seem a useless chore to all, everywhere songs will rise praising license, vice, dissolute liberty of behavior. And after that, rape, adultery, perjury, sins against nature will follow in a great wave, and disease, and soothsaying, and spells, and flying bodies will appear in the heavens, in the midst of the good Christians false prophets will rise, false apostles, corrupters, impostors, wizards, rapists, usurers, perjurers and falsifiers; the shepherds will turn into wolves, priests will lie, monks will desire things of this world, the poor will not hasten to the aid of their lords, the powerful will be without mercy, the just will bear witness to injustice. All cities will be shaken by earthquakes, there will be pestilence in every land, storm winds will uproot the earth, the fields will be contaminated, the sea will secrete black humors, new and strange wonders will take place upon the moon, the stars will abandon their courses, other stars—unknown—will furrow the sky, it will snow in summer, and in the winter the heat will be intense. And the times of the end will have come, and the end of time…

But is the unicorn a falsehood? It’s the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ, and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunter’s snares.

Hearing, a most excellent outward sense, “by which we learn and get knowledge.” His object is sound, or that which is heard; the medium, air; organ, the ear. To the sound, which is a collision of the air, three things are required: a body to strike, as the hand of a musician, the body strucken, which must be solid and able to resist, as a bell, lute-string, not wool, or sponge; the medium, the air, which is inward or outward; the outward, being struck or collided by a solid body, still strikes the next air, until it come to that inward natural air, which as an exquisite organ is contained in a little skin formed like a drum-head, and struck upon by certain small instruments like drum-sticks, conveys the sound by a pair of nerves, appropriated to that use, to the common sense, as to a judge of sounds. There is a great variety and much delight in them; for the knowledge of which consult with Boethius and other musicians.

I asked him what he was doing with a basilisk and he said that was his business.

And I could not help murmuring: “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair. Thy hair is as a flock of goats that lie along the side of Mount Gilead; thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate, thy neck is like the tower of David whereon there hang a thousand bucklers.” And I asked myself, frightened and rapt, who was she who rose before me like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, radiant as the sun, terribilis ut castorum acies ordinata.

Really, as far at least as outward appearance and behavior went, there seemed scarcely fifty gentlemen among them; and those appeared ashamed and afraid of their position. ‘Twas, indeed, as though the scum that had risen to the simmering surface of the cauldron placed over the fierce fires of revolutionary ardor had been ladled off and flung on the floor of the House of Commons.

What is difficulty? Only a word indicating the degree of strength requisite for accomplishing particular objects; a mere notice of the necessity for exertion; a bugbear to children and fools; only a mere stimulus to men.