Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Not So Much in Vogue Now
Anthony Trollope, The Spotted Dog (1870), Part I:
Newer› ‹Older
As soon as he was gone we sat looking at the learned Doctor's manuscript, and thinking of what we had done. There lay the work of years, by which our dear and venerable old friend expected that he would take rank among the great commentators of modern times. We, in truth, did not anticipate for him all the glory to which he looked forward. We feared that there might be disappointment. Hot discussion on verbal accuracies or on rules of metre are perhaps not so much in vogue now as they were a hundred years ago.Id., Part II:
The criticisms Mackenzie answered by letter, with true scholarly spirit, and the Doctor was delighted. Nothing could be more pleasant to him than a correspondence, prolonged almost indefinitely, as to the respective merits of a τὸ or a τοῦ, or on the demand for a spondee or an iamb.The Doctor's work was a treatise on The Metres of the Greek Dramatists. If such discussion is not so much in vogue these days, then so much the worse for these days.
