Laudator Temporis Acti

It took me longer than 90 minutes to read Jan Cosinka, Teach Yourself Malkielese in 90 Minutes (Berkeley: Ian Jackson Books, 2006), but that was to be expected, because of the warning on p. iv:

Timed trials by the publisher strongly suggest that it impossible to 'Teach yourself Malkielese in 90 minutes' unless the student resolves not to read the footnotes.

As is my wont, I read all of the footnotes, including this one on p. 154 (on the expression "veritable store-house of grammatical peculiarities"):

The schoolmaster's remark appears in the preface to J.T. Sheppard's edition of The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles (Cambridge University Press 1920):

This term, we are to study the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, a veritable treasure-house of grammatical peculiarities.

C.M. Bowra embroidered it lightly, changing the play to Oedipus Coloneus, in his presidential address to the Classical Association, A Classical education (Oxford University Press 1945). For E.H. Gombrich it was Homer who was taught as 'a storehouse of grammatical exceptions'—see The Image and the eye (Oxford: Phaidon 1982), p. 287. The aged Sir Robert Tate had his own way of applying the concept to Plato at Trinity College Dublin as late as the 1940s:

he was almost totally devoid of ideas, whether literary or philosophical. Once, after a term's lectures on Plato's Phaedo he said, 'Well gentlemen,' (overlooking the presence of two ladies) 'I trust that with the aid of Mr Archer-Hind we have covered all the most important points of language in this absorbing dialogue. As for the philosophy, since I am told that Plato's position does not differ materially from the Christian creed, I have felt justified in leaving it entirely alone.'

—see Niall Rudd's Pale green, light orange: a portrait of bourgeois Ireland 1930-1950 (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1994), p. 145.

One slight correction. Sheppard, p. xi, quotes the saying (attributed to "the famous schoolmaster") as follows: "Boys, you are to have the privilege of reading the Oedipus Tyrannus, a storehouse of grammatical peculiarities."

Can we identify "the famous schoolmaster"?

John Ferguson and Brian Stone in The Mediaeval Inheritance and the Revival of Classical Learning (Bletchley: Open University Press, 1972), p. 35, on what evidence I don't know, quote the saying in the form "Boys, you are this term to have the inestimable privilege of studying the Oedipus Coloneus of Sophocles, a veritable treasure-house of grammatical peculiarities," and attribute the saying to Benjamin Hall Kennedy (1804-1889), headmaster of Shrewsbury.

Elisabeth Leedham-Green, A Concise History of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; rpt. 2001), p. 30 (discussing the late fifteenth century):

The comedies of Terence were regarded as models of Latin style as well as furnishing, as Butler of Shrewbury (among others) was reported to have observed much later of Sophocles' Oedipus tyrannus, 'a veritable treasure-house of grammatical peculiarities'.

"Butler of Shrewbury" [sic] is Samuel Butler (1774-1839), headmaster of Shrewsbury. A quick search of the biography of Butler written by his grandson (novelist Samuel Butler), The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler: Head-Master of Shrewsbury School, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1896), didn't reveal the quotation.

Andreas Markantonatos, Oedipus at Colonus: Sophocles, Athens, and the World (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), p. 254, attributes the saying to "C.M. Bowra's headmaster," with no evidence other than a reference to Bowra's presidential address. Bowra was a student at Cheltenham College. During his time there, the headmaster of the junior school was Charles Thornton, and the principal of the upper school was Reginald Waterfield.

It seems, then, that "the famous schoolmaster" cannot be convincingly identified.

The phrase used by Gombrich, "a storehouse of grammatical exceptions," occurs earlier in William Wharton, "Some Remarks on Education," The Free Review 1 (1893) 74-82 (at 77, underlining added by me):

The type of culture has changed, too; and the scholar of the past, with his skill in the minutiae of scholarship, has given way to a modern successor to whom the "classics" are something more than a storehouse of grammatical exceptions or models for the manufacture of "tasteful" versions, who sees in them the literature of two peoples whose wits we are living on to the present day, and who endeavors, through the records they have left of themselves, to feel the heart beat, and the brain work, of men and women like ourselves, subject only to differences of age and surroundings.

Cf. also Charles Oman, quoted in Laura Ridding, George Ridding: Schoolmaster and Bishop (London: Edward Arnold, 1908). p. 93 (underlining added by me):

What I think that I specially owe to my old master is such skill in appreciating the style, verbal facilities, and full meaning of the classics as I ever attained to—in short, the discovery that they were literature, and not a storehouse of grammatical oddities. I specially remember his wonderful skill in hammering out the exact phrase in English that would render the full force of a classical sentence. He was never content with a baldly accurate rendering, but would try half a dozen phrases in rapid succession till he hit the exact one that gave the entire meaning in a clause in Virgil or Thucydides.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson, who kindly gave me a copy of Jan Cosinka, Teach Yourself Malkielese in 90 Minutes (a delightful and amusing book).