What must have been the feelings of this privileged circle when they learned that some lawless genius had invented a method of making Latin verses that was open to everybody who knew the alphabet, and could count up to ten on his fingers,—by which the rich cockney who had bought a country-house and a seat in Parliament, or the smart attorney who set up for a statesman, or even their own valets and footmen could turn out unlimited hexameters and pentameters of the most correct and the genteelest form, with no other equipment than just half-a-dozen small tables on which the letters of the alphabet were arranged apparently at random! Strange and portentous as the invention seemed, it worked. The verses were genuine Latin, grammatically correct, scanning perfectly, and moreover making good sense,—a requirement which, it must be owned, even the universities could not always guarantee in the hand-made verses of their graduates. Moreover, the supply was unlimited; the inventor himself said that his tables were capable of producing more than three hundred thousand different verses, or the equivalent of about fifty Æneids.
This remarkable device has long ago sunk into such profound oblivion that many of my readers may suppose it but a creation of my own fancy, if I do not describe it a little more fully. Besides it is very needful that they should all comprehend its working; for it was this, as I very candidly own, that first suggested to me the invention which the present article is chiefly meant to describe, and which will undoubtedly work a complete revolution in the practice of law and the entire administration of justice.
The "tables" mentioned above were very simple affairs, and less complicated in their operation than the "multiplication table" of our childhood. Six of them answered for a hexameter line, each table producing a word which was also a perfect "foot,"—dactyl or spondee as its place on the line required.
Five others supplied pentameters in the same way. Each was composed of ten vertical columns and from six to twelve horizontal lines, forming thus sixty to one hundred and twenty squares, in each of which was a letter of the alphabet or a blank. The modus operandi was simple in the extreme; like a modern code of procedure, it was adapted to the meanest capacity. You had only to write down the first six digits in any order you chose; thus 3, 5, 1, 4, 6, 2, or 4, 1, 3, 2, 6, 5. The arrangement being absolutely indifferent, and the six digits representing the six tables, it is evident that an almost unlimited number of combinations may be formed. To this, indeed, the poet is indebted for the pleasing variety which constitutes the charm of his poem. Having fixed his digits, he then proceeds to construct the first word of the line from the first table. The proper digit being 3 (in first row above), he counts the first letter in that table (at the upper left-hand corner; as 4, the next as 5, and so on up to 9. The ninth letter will be m, which will therefore constitute the first letter of the poem. (The inventor is careful to tell the poet to write it with a capital, evidently foreseeing that his tables may be used by many to whom little conventionalities of that sort are yet unfamiliar.)
To find the second letter, he counts nine again from his m, and finds an a; then nine more to an r; and so on till he has made out the word martia. If he had chosen the second rank of digits and begun with 4, his word formed from the same table in the same way would have been aspera. In both cases the last count of nine would land him in a blank compartment, and thus warn him that the word was already complete,—a very necessary precaution, since the poets who use these tables are not supposed to know the first rudiments of Latin, of grammar, or of prosody.
I will not bore the reader by going through the six tables to construct the entire line. The order of digits first given above (and
