"It was a night of lovely Nictoary,
High rose in cloudless blue the (what, in the name of all that is
absurd?)."
And again, _Fylander_ thrown into our December! What is {183} to become of
those lines of Praed, which I remember coming out when I was at
Cambridge,--
"Oh! now's the time of all the year for flowers and fun, the Maydays;
To trim your whiskers, curl your hair, and sinivate the ladies."
If I were asked which I preferred, this system or that of Baron
Ferrari[315] already mentioned, proceeding by _twelves_, I should reply,
with Candide, when he had the option given of running the gauntlet or being
shot: Les volontes sont libres, et je ne veux ni l'un ni l'autre.[316] We
can imagine a speculator providing such a system for Utopia as it would be
in the mind of a Laputan: but to explain how an engineer who has surveyed
mankind from Philadelphia to Rostof on the Don should for a moment
entertain the idea of such a system being actually adopted, would beat a
jury of solar-system-makers, though they were shut up from the beginning of
Anuary to the end of Tonborius. When I see such a scheme as this imagined
to be practicable, I admire the wisdom of Providence in providing the
quadrature of the circle, etc., to open a harmless sphere of action to the
possessors of the kind of ingenuity which it displays. Those who cultivate
mathematics have a right to speak strongly on such efforts of arithmetic as
this: for, to my knowledge, persons who have no knowledge are frequently
disposed to imagine that their makers are true brothers of the craft, a
little more intelligible than the rest.