I was glad to hear from Horace Q. Flack that he had arrived in England. He is something of a curiosity: American-born, he claims descent from the Roman poet Horace, whose words he is incessantly quoting.

This epitaph is on a tombstone in the churchyard of Kenmore, Perthshire, a little village on the shores of Loch Tay, close to the point at which the river leaves the parent lake. In the early nineteenth century Kenmore had some importance as the market of a wide rural area and as containing the parish church and parish school. The epitaph is the work of the son, William Armstrong, who succeeded to his father's post and died in 1879. Purists might perhaps take exception to the post-classical authority of puritate, but it will be generally allowed that as the composition of the Headmaster of a rural parish school its Latinity is as remarkable as its pietas. It is to be regretted that the author left no pupil to pay him a fitting tribute in the same tongue. But among his alumni there were many who remembered his teaching with admiring gratitude. Of these was one of the principal farmers of the district who told me years ago that he held Latin in high esteem as the subject which, as he put it, ‘opened his head’. His precise meaning eluded me until in later years I reflected that Highland farmers have a gift of imagination and a command of terse and figurative expression. Clearly what he implied was that, just as, when Hephaestus split the skull of Zeus, Athene sprung out in full panoply, so the impact of the lene tormentum of Latin on his own brain let wisdom loose.

Opinion seems to be growing among teachers of Roman history that the Empire should be more extensively studied in schools. The feeling was expressed by more than one speaker in a discussion held not so long ago by the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, and this ‘boom’ in the Empire is likely to be fostered by Robert Graves' I, Claudius and Claudius the God, and by Mr. Stevenson's text-book The Roman Empire—surely one of the first school text-books on this period.

It falls to the lot of every teacher of Latin at some time to enunciate the rule, ‘If a question expects the answer “yes”, use nonne; if it expects “no”, use num’; and then, unless he is teaching a class of dummies, the trouble begins. ‘What if you don't expect any particular answer?’ ‘Why, if there are only two possible answers to a question, should there be three ways of asking one?’ ‘What if you don't get the answer you expect? Do you have to go back and amend the question?’

Odysseus had heard long ago from the shade of Tiresias that in Ithaca he would find insolent men devouring his goods and wooing his wife, and from the shade of Agamemnon that he should arrive there in secret; and now Athene, when she found him on that April morning wandering by the shore that he had forgotten, told him that for three years past the suitors had been lording it in his house, and she at once changed him to an old man in whom no one would recognize Odysseus, sacker of cities. He knew then of his enemies and had been given the advantages of disguise and secrecy and the possibility of surprise that would go with them.

This epitaph is on a tombstone in the churchyard of Kenmore, Perthshire, a little village on the shores of Loch Tay, close to the point at which the river leaves the parent lake. In the early nineteenth century Kenmore had some importance as the market of a wide rural area and as containing the parish church and parish school. The epitaph is the work of the son, William Armstrong, who succeeded to his father's post and died in 1879. Purists might perhaps take exception to the post-classical authority of puritate, but it will be generally allowed that as the composition of the Headmaster of a rural parish school its Latinity is as remarkable as its pietas. It is to be regretted that the author left no pupil to pay him a fitting tribute in the same tongue. But among his alumni there were many who remembered his teaching with admiring gratitude. Of these was one of the principal farmers of the district who told me years ago that he held Latin in high esteem as the subject which, as he put it, ‘opened his head’. His precise meaning eluded me until in later years I reflected that Highland farmers have a gift of imagination and a command of terse and figurative expression. Clearly what he implied was that, just as, when Hephaestus split the skull of Zeus, Athene sprung out in full panoply, so the impact of the lene tormentum of Latin on his own brain let wisdom loose.