The story is told, for instance, of baffled students talking Dr. Hope’s Shakespeare course for the first time. “History advises us that Richard II died peacefully at Pontefract, probably of pneumonia,” Dr. Hope scolds. “But what does Shakespeare say, Act V, Scene V? That Exton struck him down,” and here the famous authority on Elizabethan literature will pause for emphasis, “with a blushing crow!” Imaginative sophomores have been known to suffer nightmare as a result of this remark. Older heads nod intelligently, of course, knowing that Dr. Hope meant merely to say—in fact, thought he was saying—“a crushing blow.” The good dean’s unconscious spoonerisms, like the sayings of Miss Parker and Mr. Goldwyn, are reverently preserved by aficionados, among whom Ellery counts himself a charter member. It is Ellery who has saved for posterity that deathless pronouncement of Dr. Hope’s to a freshman class in English composition: “All those who persist in befouling their theme papers with cant and other low expressions not in good usage are warned for the last time: Refine your style or be exiled from this course with the rest of the vanished Bulgarians!”
What do You think about Queen’s Bureau Of Investigation?
