Sunday, June 20, 2010
Not at All Points Improving
William Allingham, By the Way: Verses, Fragments, and Notes, arranged by Helen Allingham (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), p. 75:
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"Laudator temporis acti" is a very old jest or taunt; and no doubt the world looks brighter to most of us at twenty than at sixty; nevertheless a man must have leave to say, if he think so, that the world—even supposing general progress to be a necessary doctrine—is not at all points improving. Nay, does not history teach us that the praisers of the good old times must have been sometimes in the right of it, at least in the comparison of one generation with another?Hat tip: Stephen Pentz.
