By Order of the King — Victor Hugo

Ursus was wont to say: The expectoration of a sentence is a relief. The wolf is comforted by its howl, the sheep by its wool, the forest by its finch, woman by her love, and the philosopher by his epiphonema. Ursus at a pinch composed comedies, which, in recital, he all but acted; this helped to sell the drugs. Among other works, he had composed an heroic pastoral in honour of Sir Hugh Middleton, who in 1608 brought a river to London. The river was lying peacefully in Hertfordshire, twenty miles from London the knight came and took possession of it. He brought a brigade of six hundred men, armed with shovels and pickaxes; set to breaking up the ground, scooping it out in one place, raising it in another - now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep made wooden aqueducts high in air; and at different points con structed eight hundred bridges Of stone, bricks, and timber. One fine morning the river entered London, which was short of water. Ursus transformed all these vulgar details into a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the New River, in which the former invited the latter to come to him, and offered her his bed, saying, i I am too old to please women, but I am rich enough to pay 'them, - an ingenious and gallant conceit to indicate how Sir Hugh Middleton had completed the work at his own expense.

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