Laudator Temporis Acti

Edward FitzGerald, letter to E.B. Cowell (January 9, 1876), in The Letters of Edward FitzGerald, edd. Alfred McKinley Terhune and Annabelle Burdick Terhune, Vol. III: 1867-1876 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 645-646 (at 646, with the editors' note 2):

I see by the Athenaeum that Browning and Swinburne go on pouring out Volumes of Verse. I wonder it does not strike them it would be better to follow the old Horatian forbearance for nine years:² I suppose Gray brooded over his one little Elegy for all that time: and (with all its faults) it endures—as I think nothing which these more aspiring Geniuses do will.

² Nine or ten years elapsed between the appearance of the first three books of Horace's Odes (23 B.C.) and the fourth (14-13). Subsequently, in one of his Epistles, the poet states that he had intended to abandon lyric poetry, but, in fact, he produced other works during the decade.

This is a very misleading note. FitzGerald was of course referring to a well-known passage in Horace's Ars Poetica, lines 385-390 (emphasis added):

tu nihil invita dices faciesve Minerva;
id tibi iudicium est, ea mens. si quid tamen olim
scripseris, in Maeci descendat iudicis auris
et patris et nostras, nonumque prematur in annum,
membranis intus positis: delere licebit
quod non edideris; nescit vox missa reverti.

In H. Rushton Fairclough's translation:

But you will say nothing and do nothing against Minerva's will; such is your judgement, such your good sense. Yet if ever you do write anything, let it enter the ears of some critical Maecius, and your father's and my own; then put your parchment in the closet and keep it back till the ninth year. What you have not published you can destroy; the word once sent forth can never come back.

Related post: Your Man Sallust.

Labels: typographical and other errors