Laudator Temporis Acti

C.S. Lewis, diary (March 1, 1924):

I spent most of the morning in the kitchen cutting up turnips and peeling onions for D, and then went for an hour's walk in the fields. After lunch and jobs I took Euripides from his shelf for the first time this many a day, with some idea of reading a Greek play every week end (when I am not writing) so as to keep up my Greek. I began the Heracleidae. Coming back to Greek tragedy after so long an absence I was greatly impressed with its stiffness and rumness and also thought the choruses strangely prosaic. The effort to represent a scuffle between Iolaus and the Herald is intolerably languid. After the first shock, however, I enjoyed it.

Id. (March 4, 1924):

After breakfast I walked into town. I went to the library in College and looked up in Paley three passages in the Heracleidae that had baffled me. Paley emended one of them and "supplied" words and sentences to the other two. How easy it is to translate anything on these terms!