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VIVIAN GREY.
17

school were scribbling embryo prize-poems, epics of twenty lines on "the Ruins of Pæstum," and "the Temple of Minerva;" "Agrigentum," and "the Cascade of Terni."—I suppose that Vivian's productions at this time, would have been rejected by the commonest twopenny publication about town—yet they turned the brain of the whole school; while fellows who were writing Latin Dissertations, and Greek Odes which might have made the fortune of the Classical Journal, were looked on by the multitude as as great dunderheads as themselves:—and such is the advantage which, even in this artificial world, every thing that is genuine has over every thing that is false and forced. The dunderheads who wrote "good Latin," and "Attic Greek," did it by a process, by means of which, the youngest fellow in the school was conscious he could, if he chose, attain at the same perfection. Vivian Grey's