Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/169

Rh his muslin bride, who is already blessed, and changing almost into stone, to find that the same lips can both kiss and preach: in my opinion, I say, when a man effects all this, he has some right to require of any Biographer who would paint his situation, that he—hold his jaw; and of the reader who would sympathise with it, that he open his, and preach himself.— —

But what I must ex officio depict, is the day to which this Sunday was but the prelude, the vigil and the whet; I mean the prelude, the vigil and the whet to the Martini Actus, or Martinmas Exhibition, of his school. On Sunday was the Sermon, on Wednesday the Actus, on Tuesday the Rehearsal. This Tuesday shall now be delineated to the universe.

I count upon it that I shall not be read by mere people of the world alone, to whom a School-Actus cannot truly appear much better, or more interesting, than some Investiture of a Bishop, or the opera seria of a Frankfort Coronation; but that I likewise have people before me, who have been at schools, and who know how the school-drama of an Actus, and the stage-manager, and the playbill (the Program) thereof are to be estimated, still without overrating their importance.

Before proceeding to the Rehearsal of the Martini Actus, I impose upon myself, as dramaturgist of the play, the duty, if not of extracting, at least of recording the Conrector’s Letter of Invitation. In this composition he said many things; and (what an author likes so well) made proposals rather than reproaches; interrogatively reminding the public, Whether in regard to the well-known head-breakages of Priscian on the part of the Magnates in Pest and Poland, our school-houses were not the best quarantine and lazar-houses to protect us against infectious barbarisms? Moreover, he defended in schools what could be defended (and nothing in the world is sweeter or easier than a defence); and said, Schoolmasters, who not quite justifiably, like certain Courts, spoke nothing, and let nothing be spoken to them but Latin, might plead the Romans in excuse, whose subjects, and whose kings, at least in their epistles and public transactions, were obliged to make use of the Latin tongue. He wondered why only our Greek, and not also our Latin Grammars, were composed in Latin, and put the pregnant question: Whether the Romans, when Rh