Laudator Temporis Acti

The ancients will never become obsolete; they are and remain the lodestar for all our efforts, whether in literature or the plastic arts, and we must never lose sight of this. Discredit and disgrace await the age that dares to set aside the ancients.

Nie werden die Alten veralten. Sie sind und bleiben der Polarstern für alle unsere Bestrebungen, sei es in der Litteratur, oder in der bildenden Kunst, den wir nie aus den Augen verlieren dürfen. Schande wartet des Zeitalters, welches sich vermessen möchte, die Alten bei Seite zu setzen.

Credulity and Falsehood copulate, and give birth to Opinion.

Le mensonge et la crédulité s'accouplent et engendrent l'Opinion.

Titullus, I warn you, live. It is always late for that.
Though you start in your schooldays, it's late.

Titulle, moneo, vive: semper hoc serum est;
sub paedagogo coeperis licet, serum est.

sumen, aprum, leporem, boletos, ostrea, mullos

• Some Lines in Lucretius
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters in Sidonius
• Verse-Filling Asyndeton
• Verse-Filling Asyndeton: Some Greek Examples
• Another Greek Example of Verse-Filling Asyndeton
• More Examples of Asyndeton Filling Hexameters
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters in Corippus
• Twelve Gods
• Seven Cities
• A Hexameter Consisting of Nouns in Asyndeton
• More Hexameters Consisting of Words in Asyndeton
• Hexameters Consisting of Words in Asyndeton: Dracontius
• Zopyrus' Victims
• A Latin Hexameter Consisting of Adjectives in Asyndeton
• Hexameters Consisting Entirely of Words in Asyndeton: More Greek Examples
• A Sojourn in the Country
• Destruction
• Hexameters Consisting Entirely of Words in Asyndeton: A Horatian Example
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters: Bernard of Cluny, De Contemptu Mundi, Book I
• A Good Land
• A Greek Hexameter Consisting of Adjectives in Asyndeton

• principumque princeps (6.4.1)
• tribadum tribas (7.70.1)

• King of Kings, and Lord of Lords
• King of Kings Again
• Aeschylus?

A man who is "sound of mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

L'homme sain d'esprit est celui qui porte le fou à l'intérieur.

Perhaps nothing astonishes the observer of the Greek world more than when he discovers that from time to time the Greeks made as it were a festival of all their passions and evil natural inclinations and even instituted a kind of official order of proceedings in the celebration of what was all-too-human in them: this constitutes the real paganism of their world, uncomprehended by and incomprehensible to Christianity, which has always despised and combatted it with the greatest severity. — They took this all-too-human to be inescapable and, instead of reviling it, preferred to accord it a kind of right of the second rank through regulating it within the usages of society and religion: indeed, everything in man possessing power they called divine and inscribed it on the walls of their Heaven. They do not repudiate the natural drive that finds expression in the evil qualities but regulate it and, as soon as they have discovered sufficient prescriptive measures to provide these wild waters with the least harmful means of channeling and outflow, confine them to definite cults and days. This is the root of all the moral free-mindedness of antiquity. One granted to the evil and suspicious, to the animal and backward, likewise to the barbarian, the pre-Greek and Asiatic, that still lived on in the foundations of the Hellenic nature, a moderate discharge, and did not strive after their total annihilation.

Vielleicht gibt es nichts Befremdenderes für den, welcher sich die griechische Welt ansieht, als zu entdecken, dass die Griechen allen ihren Leidenschaften und bösen Naturhängen von Zeit zu Zeit gleichsam Feste gaben und sogar eine Art Festordnung ihres Allzumenschlichen von Staats wegen einrichteten: es ist dies das eigentlich Heidnische ihrer Welt, vom Christentume aus nie begriffen, nie zu begreifen und stets auf das härteste bekämpft und verachtet. — Sie nahmen jenes Allzumenschliche als unvermeidlich und zogen vor, statt es zu beschimpfen, ihm eine Art Recht zweiten Ranges durch Einordnung in die Bräuche der Gesellschaft und des Kultus zu geben: ja alles, was im Menschen Macht hat, nannten sie göttlich und schrieben es an die Wände ihres Himmels. Sie leugnen den Naturtrieb, der in den schlimmen Eigenschaften sich ausdrückt, nicht ab, sondern ordnen ihn ein und beschränken ihn auf bestimmte Kulte und Tage, nachdem sie genug Vorsichtsmassregeln erfunden haben, um jenen wilden Gewässern einen möglichst unschädlichen Abfluss geben zu können. Dies ist die Wurzel aller moralistischen Freisinnigkeit des Altertums. Man gönnte dem Bösen und Bedenklichen, dem Tierisch-Rückständigen ebenso wie dem Barbaren, Vor-Griechen und Asiaten, welcher im Grunde des griechischen Wesens noch lebte, eine mässige Entladung und strebte nicht nach seiner völligen Vernichtung.

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without destroying each other, without hating each other to death?

Quelle que soit la grande ville où le hasard me porte, j'admire qu'il ne s'y déclenche pas tous les jours des soulèvements, des massacres, une boucherie sans nom, un désordre de fin du monde. Comment, sur un espace aussi réduit, tant d'hommes peuvent-ils coexister sans se détruire, sans se haïr mortellement?

What the young need is to listen to Mozart, look at Chardin, learn geography, and memorize miles of poetry.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous. Which does not keep our thoughts from being contaminated by the presence of the human, from stinking of the human, and from being unable to cleanse themselves of it. Of what truths are we capable, to what revelation can we rise, when this pestilence asphyxiates the mind and disqualifies it from considering anything but the pernicious and fetid animal whose emanations it endures? He who is too weak to declare war on mankind must never forget, in his moments of fervor, to pray for a second Flood, more radical than the first.

La multiplication de nos semblables confine à l'immonde le devoir de les aimer, au saugrenu. Il n'empêche que toutes nos pensées sont contaminées par la présence de l'humain, qu'elles sentent l'humain, et qu'elles n'arrivent pas à s'en dégager. De quelle vérité seraient-elles susceptibles, à quelle révélation pourraient-elles se hausser, quand cette pestilence asphyxie l'esprit et le rend impropre à considérer autre chose que l'animal pernicieux et fétide dont il subit les émanations? Celui qui est trop faible pour déclarer la guerre à l'homme ne devrait jamais oublier, dans ses moments de ferveur, de prier pour l'avènement d'un second déluge, plus radical que le premier.

It is a good thing even to lie with a woman
in love.

ἀγαθὸν δὲ γυναικί περ ἐν φιλότητι
μίσγεσθ᾽...

Sophoclism. — Who has ever put more water into their wine than the Greeks! Sobriety and gracefulness combined — that was the privilege of the nobility of Athens at the time of Sophocles and after him. Imitate them who can! In life and in works!

Sophokleismus. — Wer hat mehr Wasser in den Wein gegossen als die Griechen! Nüchternheit und Grazie verbunden — das war das Adels-Vorrecht des Atheners zur Zeit des Sophokles und nach ihm. Mache es nach, wer da kann! Im Leben und Schaffen!

The meals which were brought to the Elect were therefore selected for their richness in Light. By eating fruit and grain, they killed nothing. Instead, their stomachs separated out the waste matter (perhaps in visibly greater bulk, as they were vegetarians): it was then excreted, but never into water as it would pollute it. For the Elect, a modern lavatory would be an abomination. After digesting it, the Elect then breathed out the remaining Light from their mouths, especially while praying and singing. They also sweated it, hiccupped it or even, so the older Augustine mocked, farted it out to set it on its way back to heaven. Manichaeism is the only world religion to have believed in the redemptive power of farts.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

What is more, even Grammar, the basis of all education, baffles the brains of the younger generation today. For if you take note, there is not a single modern schoolboy who can compose verses or write a decent letter. I doubt too whether one in a hundred can read a Latin author, or decipher a word of any foreign language. — And no wonder, for at every level of our educational system you'll find Humbug in charge, and his colleague Flattery tagging along behind him. And as for dons and Divinity lecturers — the men who are supposed to master all branches of learning, and be ready to debate every question and answer every argument — I am ashamed to say that if you were to examine them tomorrow in the Arts and Sciences, they would all be ploughed!

Grammer, the ground of al, bigileth now children:        370
For is noon of thise newe clerkes—whoso nymeth hede—
That kan versifye faire ne formaliche enditen,
Ne naught oon among an hundred that an auctour kan construwe,
Ne rede a lettre in any langage but in Latyn or in Englissh.
Go now to any degree, and but if gile be maister,        375
And flaterere his felawe [to fourmen under hym],
Muche wonder me thynketh amonges us alle!
Doctours of decrees and of divinite maistres,
That sholde konne and knowe alle kynnes clergie,
And answere to arguments and a1so to a quodlibet—        380
I dar noght siggen it for shame—if swiche were apposed,
Thei sholde faillen of hir Philosophie, and in Phisik bothe.

No, quite the contrary, I do have a religion, my own religion, and in fact I'm more religious than all of them, with their charades and their mumbo-jumbo. Yes indeed, I do worship God! I believe in a Supreme Being, a Creator, whoever he may be, it's of no importance to me, who put us here on earth to do our duty as citizens and fathers; but I don't need to go into a church and kiss silver platters and dig into my pocket to fatten up a lot of humbugs who eat better than you or I do! Because he can be worshipped just as well in a wood, or a field, or even just gazing at the ethereal vault, like the ancients. My God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Béranger! I believe in the credo of the Vicaire savoyard and in the immortal principles of '89! I've no time for an old dodderer of a god who goes round his garden with a walking stick, quarters his friends in the bellies of whales, dies giving a shriek, and then comes back to life after three days: things not only absurd in themselves but which are, furthermore, flatly contradicted by every law of the physical universe; which only goes to prove, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in the most profound ignorance, in which they do their best to engulf the entire populace along with themselves.

J'ai une religion, ma religion, et même j'en ai plus qu'eux tous avec leurs mômeries et leurs jongleries. J'adore Dieu, au contraire! Je crois en l'Être suprême, à un créateur quel qu'il soit, peu m'importe, qui nous a placés ici-bas pour y remplir nos devoirs de citoyen et de père de famille; mais je n'ai pas besoin d’aller dans une église baiser des plats d'argent et engraisser de ma poche un tas de farceurs qui se nourrissent mieux que nous. Car on peut l'honorer aussi bien dans un bois, dans un champ, ou même en contemplant la voûte éthérée, comme les anciens. Mon Dieu, à moi, c'est le Dieu de Socrate, de Franklin, de Voltaire et de Béranger! Je suis pour la Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard et les immortels principes de 89! Aussi je n'admets pas un bonhomme de Bon Dieu qui se promène dans son parterre la canne à la main, loge ses amis dans le ventre des baleines, meurt en poussant un cri et ressuscite au bout de trois jours — choses absurdes en elles-mêmes et complètement opposées d’ailleurs à toutes les lois de la physique, ce qui nous démontre, en passant, que les prêtres ont toujours croupi dans une ignorance turpide, où ils s'efforcent d'engloutir avec eux les populations.

Civilization was over when the first automobile rolled. I'm not being funny. A civis lives in a city. The whole concept of city was negated by the automobile. Quite literally the Late Pleistocene is eating the Eocene. It is an elegant cycle in world history. Dinosaur to car to zilch.

Thus we were handed over to counterfeits of infinity, to an absolute without metaphysical dimensions, submerged in speed since we were not plunged into ecstasy. This panting contraption, the answer to our fidgets, and these specters that work it, this procession of automata, this parade of hallucinated zombies—where are they going, what are they seeking? What wind of madness bears them onward? Each time I tend to absolve them, each time I entertain doubts as to the legitimacy of the aversion or terror they inspire in me, I need only think of the country roads, on a Sunday, for the image of that motorized vermin to confirm me in my disgust and my dread. Use of the legs being abolished, the walker, among these paralytics behind the wheel, seems an eccentric or an outlaw; soon he will appear to be a monster. No more contact with the ground: all that sinks into it has become alien and incomprehensible to us. Cut off from every root, unfit, moreover, to mix with dust or mud, we have achieved the feat of breaking not only with the depths of things, but with their very surface. Civilization, at this stage, would seem to be a bargain with the Devil, if man still had a soul to sell.

Then I hear that my friend has finished Aristophanes, Plato, Cicero, and Grotius, and I take shame to myself.

What's wrong with higher education is precisely classes. There shouldn't be any. Gutenberg obsoleted the class at one sweep. Nobody noticed. My problem is that my students seem to enjoy—or tolerate—my lecturing about books, but they won't READ them. If they read books they wouldn't need me, though if they wanted to understand the books better, I could help them, and if they wanted to write books of their own, I could help them.

One would make a fit little boy stare if one asked him: "Would you like to become virtuous?"—but he will open his eyes wide if asked: "Would you like to become stronger than your friends?"—

Ein kleiner tüchtiger Bursch wird ironisch blicken, wenn man ihn fragt: »Willst du tugendhaft werden?«—aber er macht die Augen auf, wenn man ihn fragt: »Willst du stärker werden, als deine Kameraden?«—

I would have liked to thank the Bodleian Library after its many years as my working home, but it is no longer a pleasure to work on patristic authors in it after the upheavals imposed in 2013 and the breaking by the former Librarian...of the carefully planned link between pagan and Christian worlds which had underlain its lower reading rooms productively for many years. Research into Augustine now means crawling on hands and knees to find essential journals in a sub-basement, while the outer building publicizes newly built access points for the disabled. Recent major books on Augustine have gone unordered...

These ancients are always the ones we return to when it is a matter of the art of living, whose secret two thousand years of supernature and convulsive charity have stolen from us. We return to them, to their poise and their amenity, provided we are free of that frenzy Christianity has inculcated in us; the curiosity they waken corresponds to a lowering of our fever, a retreat toward health.

Ces anciens, nous revenons toujours à eux dès qu'il s'agit de l'art de vivre dont deux mille ans de surnature et de charité convulsive nous ont fait perdre le secret. Nous revenons à eux, à leur pondération et à leur aménité, pour peu que tombe cette frénésie que nous a inculquée le christianisme; la curiosité qu'ils éveillent en nous correspond à une diminution de notre fièvre, à un recul vers la santé.

'Fondling', she saith, 'Since I have hemmed thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,        230
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer:
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain, or in dale;
    Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
    Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

'Within this limit is relief enough,        235
Sweet bottom grass, and high delightful plain,
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest, and from rain:
    Then be my deer, since I am such a park.
    No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.'        240

When you are framing your laws, you must scrutinize their purport; but when you have passed them, you must uphold them and put them in force, for that is required by your oath and by justice as well.

χρὴ δ᾿, ὅταν μὲν τιθῆσθε τοὺς νόμους, ὁποῖοί τινές εἰσι σκοπεῖν, ἐπειδὰν δὲ θῆσθε, φυλάττειν καὶ χρῆσθαι· καὶ γὰρ εὔορκα ταῦθ᾿ ὑμῖν ἐστι καὶ ἄλλως δίκαια.

I don't know about sides. I go my own way...

I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me...

Everybody has his own delusion assigned to him.

suus cuique attributus est error.

The ample oratorical manner which had recently been brought to perfection by Cicero was admirably designed to beguile and persuade an audience: it dealt in generous commonplaces, facile oppositions between right and wrong, and high-minded appeals to vulgar emotion.

Do you realise how fortunate you are to read German? It is becoming—to judge from most of my pupils—an extinct language in England. And yet what wonderful books were written in it in the Goethezeit! Do you know Voigt's die Wiederbelebung des klassischen Alterthums: it is a marvellous book, never translated. And—though of course much later—Gregorovius's Wanderjahre in Italien? But I may be prejudiced in favour of Gregorovius: I taught myself German as an undergraduate, reading his Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter.

Ah, what is more blessed than to put cares away, when the mind lays by its burden, and tired with labour of far travel we have come to our own home and rest on the couch we longed for?

o quid solutis est beatius curis,
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum
desideratoque acquiescimus lecto?

Labels: typographical and other errors

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good,
A shining gloss that vadeth suddenly,
A flower that dies when first it gins to bud,
A brittle glass that's broken presently,
    A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower,
    Lost, vaded, broken, dead within an hour.

And as goods lost are seld or never found,
As vaded gloss no rubbing will refresh,
As flowers dead lie withered on the ground,
As broken glass no cement can redress,
    So beauty blemished once, for ever lost,
    In spite of physic, painting, pain and cost.

An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels its votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more and more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous anger to the next.

Each party has its own program of indignation, and its standard reflexes.

L'attitude de l'indignation habituelle, signe d'une grande pauvreté de l'esprit. La «politique» y contraint ses suppôts. On voit leur esprit s'appauvrir de jour en jour, de juste colère en juste colère.

Chaque parti a son programme d'indignation, ses réflexes conventionnels.

I do not like the man who while drinking his wine beside the full mixing-bowl talks of strife and tearful war: I like him who by mingling the splendid gifts of the Muses and Aphrodite remembers the loveliness of the feast.

οὐ φιλέω ὃς κρητῆρι παρὰ πλέῳ οἰνοποτάζων
    νείκεα καὶ πόλεμον δακρυόεντα λέγει,
ἀλλ᾿ ὅστις Μουσέων τε καὶ ἀγλαὰ δῶρ᾿ Ἀφροδίτης
    συμμίσγων ἐρατῆς μνήσκεται εὐφροσύνης.

Wanting to make other people share one's opinion strikes me as indecent.

Proselytism baffles me.

Crabbèd age and youth cannot live together:
Youth is full of pleasance, Age is full of care;
Youth like summer morn, Age like winter weather;
Youth like summer brave, Age like winter bare;
Youth is full of sport, Age’s breath is short;
Youth is nimble, Age is lame;
Youth is hot and bold, Age is weak and cold,
Youth is wild and Age is tame.

For who of you is unaware that the reason for the frequency of these assaults is the failure to punish the offenders, and that the only way to prevent such assaults in the future is adequately to punish every offender who is caught?

τίς γὰρ οὐκ οἶδεν ὑμῶν τοῦ μὲν πολλὰ τοιαῦτα γενέσθαι τὸ μὴ κολάζεσθαι τοὺς ἐξαμαρτάνοντας αἴτιον ὄν, τοῦ δὲ μηδέν᾿ ὑβρίζειν τὸ λοιπὸν τὸ δίκην τὸν ἀεὶ ληφθένθ᾿ ἣν προσήκει διδόναι μόνον αἴτιον ἂν γενόμενον;

And when the Constitution is rewritten, it must say: All occupations will be within walking distance of the laborer's house, and the walk there between shall pass friendly dogs, cats, and well-bred children.

FIRST AMENDMENT. No vehicle of any kidney propelled by mechanical power of any description shall operate within the borders of the United States.

SECOND AMENDMENT. All public offices shall be filled by incumbents selected by chance. The names of all citizens between the ages of 45 and 100, none excluded for any reason, shall be placed in capsules in a Large Bowl ...

How many ancient practices—honor, respect, veneration, panegyrics, thanksgiving—are by way of becoming oddities and passing from active life into museums! (Someone might do worse than found a Museum of Dead Sentiments.)

But you, shameless one, we followed here in order to please you,
seeking to win recompense for Menelaus and for you, dogface,
from the Trojans. This you do not regard or take thought of.

ἀλλὰ σοί, ὦ μέγ᾿ ἀναιδὲς, ἅμ᾿ ἑσπόμεθ᾿ ὄφρα σὺ χαίρῃς,
τιμὴν ἀρνύμενοι Μενελάῳ σοί τε, κυνῶπα,
πρὸς Τρώων· τῶν οὔ τι μετατρέπῃ οὐδ᾿ ἀλεγίζεις.

The Eastern view of dogs as filthy scavengers had been transmitted via the Bible to medieval England and was still widely current in the sixteenth century. The Book of Revelation suggested that at the Resurrection dogs, like other unclean beings, would be excluded from the New Jerusalem. Some commentators thought this meant 'men of dogged impudency and maliciousness',⁴⁷ but most took it literally. Chaucer has nothing good to say about the dog and neither has Shakespeare. In popular proverbs there was no suggestion that the dog might be faithful and affectionate; instead, we have 'as greedy as a dog', 'a surly as a butcher's dog', and 'a dog's life'.⁴⁸ Fine ladies, observed the Elizabethan Thomas Muffett, hated lice, even 'more than dogs and vipers'⁴⁹ The dog, said a Jacobean preacher, was an emblem of greed and shamelessness: 'a most unclean and filthy creature which goeth publicly and promiscuously to generation'. Dogs were filthy beastly, quarrelsome creatures, agreed the sectary George Foster.⁵⁰ In 1662 the preacher Thomas Brooks classified dogs with 'vermin', and in eighteenth-century painting the dog frequently remained a symbol of man's baser parts: he represented gluttony, lust, coarse bodily functions and general disruptiveness. 'In all countries and languages,' declared a mid-eighteenth-century author, '"Dog" is a name of contempt.'⁵¹

47. Revelation, xxii.15; Thomas Brightman, The Revelation of St John Illustrated (4th edn, 1644), 888.

48. Beryl Rowland, Blind Beasts (Kent State U.P., 1971), 161; Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge, 1935), 195-9; Tilley, Dictionary of the Proverbs, 163, 74, 168; F. Edward Hulme, Proverb Lore (1902), 164.

49. Mouffet, Theater of Insects, 1093.

50. Francis Rollenson, Sermons preached before his Maiestie (1611), 59-60; John Weemse, An Exposition of the Second Table of the Moral! Law (1636), 163; George Foster, The Pouring Forth of the Seventh and Last Viall (1650), 21.

51. Thomas Brooks, The Crown & Glory of Christianity (1662), 54. See Ronald Paulson, Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth (1979), chap. 5.

When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn't work out. I mean 'Οὐκ ἔστιν καλὸν λαβεῖν τὸν ἄρτον τῶν τέκνων καὶ βαλεῖν τοῖς κυναρίοις'. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!

I once knew a curious man who believed everything he read in one newspaper and not a word of what he read in another.

Quite a character, in fact—now in a mental home.

J'ai connu un être bizarre qui croyait tout ce qu'il lisait dans un certain journal, et rien de ce qu'il lisait dans un autre.

C'était un original; enfermé depuis.

Dersu strode on in silence, serenely seeing everything. I was revelling in the view, but he looked at a twig broken off at the height of a man's arm, and from the way it was hanging knew the direction in which the man had been going. From the freshness of the fracture he judged the time that had elapsed. Whenever I failed to see a point, to draw a conclusion, or express doubt, he said reproachfully:

"How you go many years in taigá don't understand?"

What to me seemed incomprehensible was to him clear and simple. Sometimes he would pick up a spoor where with the best intention in the world I could see nothing. Yet he could tell that an old wapiti hind had passed that way with her fawn. They had browsed on the Spiræa as they passed and then been suddenly startled at something and bolted.

This was not all done for the sake of impressing me. We knew each other too well for that. It was simply done from lifelong habit, never to overlook details, and to be attentive to everything, and always observant. If he had not learnt from childhood to understand the art of tracking, he would have soon died of hunger. Whenever I passed by a particularly obvious track, Dersu would chuckle, wag his head, and say:

"H'm! Just like small boy. Go walk, wag head; have eyes, no-can look-see, no-can understand. True, that sort man live in towns. No need go hunt wapiti. Want eat ... go buy meat. No-can live all-alone in taigá soon go-lost."

He was quite right. A thousand risks await the solitary wayfarer in the taigá, and only he who can read the signs can count upon reaching the end of his journey in safety.

Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all.

In ipsa item Catholica Ecclesia magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.

What has been believed by all, always and everywhere, has every likelihood of being untrue.

How many expressions of opinion are products of intestinal flatulence! They relieve the man giving vent to them, but pollute the intellectual air of others. This goes for insults, mockery, and exclamations.

Solomon said: 'Books are famous, they abundantly proclaim the ordered mind to the one who thinks at all. They strengthen and establish resolute thought, make merry the mind of each man against the mental oppressions of this life.'

Saturn said: 'Bold is he who tastes of the power of books, he will always be the wiser who has control of them.'

Solomon said: 'They present victory to each of the righteous, a harbour of safety for those who love them.'

---

Salomon cuæð:
Bec sindon breme,    bodiað geneahhe
weotodne willan    ðam ðe wiht hygeð.
gestrangað hie and gestaðeliað    staðolfæstne geðoht,
amyrgað modsefan    manna gehwylces
of ðreaniedlan    ðisses lifes.

Saturnus cwæð:
Bald bið se ðe onbyregeð    boca cræftes;
symle bið ðe wisra    ðe hira geweald hafað.

Salomon cuæð:
Sige hie onsendað    soðfæstra gehwam,
hælo hyðe,    ðam ðe hie lufað.

—The church is precisely that against which Jesus preached—and against which he taught his disciples to fight—

—Die Kirche ist exakt Das, wogegen Jesus gepredigt hat—und wogegen er seine Jünger kämpfen lehrte—

I well recall in the mid-1970s, when working as a finds supervisor for a big urban excavation, the sudden appearance of cod and ling vertebrae on the finds trays amongst all the normal potsherds and mammal bone. This took place the day after everyone working on the site had listened to a lecture by a highly enthusiastic fish bone specialist. As fish bones go, these are large; but they had rarely appeared in the preceding weeks. It was a classic example of the phenomenon that what goes on the finds tray is what the excavator recognises. Not all digging teams can have the opportunity of being similarly enthused and, even if they are, they would still miss the smaller species.

Myths have no life of their own. They wait for us to give them flesh. If one man in the world answers their call, they give us their strength in all its fullness.

Les mythes n'ont pas de vie par eux-mêmes. Ils attendent que nous les incarnions. Qu'un seul homme au monde réponde à leur appel, et ils nous offrent leur sève intacte.

In a civilized world, it is true, such men are seldom tolerated; but if we look back at the cataclysmic periods of society, at periods of revolution and violent social change, his prototype is there. It is the Grand Inquisitor, the mystic in politics, the man who is prepared to sacrifice humanity to an abstract ideal. The Grand Inquisitors of history were not cruel or self-indulgent men. They were often painfully conscientious and austere in their personal lives. They were often scrupulously kind to animals, like St Robert Bellarmine, who refused to disturb the fleas in his clothes. Since they could not hope for theological bliss (he said), it would be uncharitable to deny them that carnal refreshment to which alone they could aspire. But for men who, having opportunities of worshipping aright, chose wrong, no remedy was too drastic. So the faggots were piled and lit, and the misbelievers and their books were burnt, and those gentle old bishops went home to sup on white fish and inexpensive vegetables, to feed their cats and canaries, and to meditate on the Penitential Psalms, while their chaplains sat down in their studies to compose their biographies and explain to posterity the saintly lives, the observances and austerities, the almsgivings and simplicity, of those exemplary pastors, knowing (as Cardinal Newman said) that it is better that all humanity should perish in extremest agony than that one single venial sin should be committed.

Bellarmine patiently and humbly allowed the fleas and other odious vermin to prey upon him. We shall have heaven, said he, to reward us for our sufferings: but these poor creatures have nothing but the enjoyment of the present life.

I said [Twelve Lectures VIII.4], "The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse."

How little of religion there is in Homer! I have cast my mind over Iliad and Odyssey, over all 48 books of them, and (although no doubt I have forgotten much) I can only remember three clergymen; and even they are not noticeably devout. First, of course, there is the first person who enters the stage in the Iliad, the Revd Chryses, vicar of the parish of Chryse, who starts all the trouble by mobilising his patron and persuading him to intervene in his own domestic troubles (which have nothing whatever to do with religion); thus confirming the wise observation of our present Prime Minister's old Nanny, as quoted by him at a Cabinet meeting, that 'whenever there is a spot of trouble in the world, if only you will look deep enough, you will always find a clergyman at the bottom of it'. Then there is our old friend whose name I have forgotten [Maron, in Odyssey 9.97 ff.], the epicurean incumbent of Ismaros, who is only remembered because of his particularly choice cellar, and his refusal to part with the key of it except to his safely teetotal housekeeper. And finally, I recall some rather primitive lower, unbeneficed clergy—I expect it was a theological college, like Cuddesdon—at Dodona, who are only mentioned because of their unhygienic habits of sleeping on the ground and not washing their feet: ἀνιπτόποδες χαμαιεῦναι [Iliad 16.235]. Perhaps I shall remember others later, but on the whole I think we can take these three as typical representatives of the Homeric Established Church: and a very typical Established Church too.

"My dear Messalla," Aper rejoined, "you are never done admiring what is old and out of date, and that alone, while you keep pouring ridicule and scorn on the culture of the present day."

Tum Aper: "Non desinis, Messalla, vetera tantum et antiqua mirari, nostrorum autem temporum studia inridere atque contemnere."

The only dog to become a saint was a French greyhound, unjustly killed after saving a child from a snake in the diocese of Lyons; in the thirteenth century the common people knew him as St Guinefort, and healing miracles on sickly children were performed at his tomb until the Dominicans suppressed the cult.⁵⁸

58. In his Le saint Lévrier, Guinefort, guérisseur d'enfants depuis le XIII^e siècle (Paris, 1979), Jean-Claude Schmitt reveals that the cult was still in existence in the later nineteenth century. His book provides a brilliant analysis of the myth and the elements which gave it potency.

I regret this for all sensitive readers, but the fart, even if not emitted, cannot be omitted. Those who do not want to talk about it would also have to have kept silent about the arse. The subject matter demands it, and after we have spoken about oral matters, our presentation, for better or for worse, must go through its anal phase before we come to the genitals. To speak of the fart is not difficult insofar as it represents a sound that always means something in social situations. Witnesses of a fart inevitably interpret the sound. All in all, the semantics of the fart is a rather complicated problem, a problem that is seriously neglected by linguistics and communication research. The scale of meaning stretches from awkwardness to contempt, from humorous intentions to lack of respect. Teachers, professors, speakers, and conference participants all know the torture of having to stifle a fart because such a sound expresses something that, in reality, one does not want to say. Could it aid our empathy with politicians if, in listening to their speeches, we were to think more often that they are possibly at that very moment concentrating on subduing a fart that has been wanting to interrupt their talk? The art of the vague statement is related to the art of unobtrusive flatulence: Both are diplomacy.

Semiotically, we assign the fart to the group of signals, that is, of signs, which neither symbolize nor depict something but rather point to a situation.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

As for Shakespeare, don't read too many commentaries. In reading any great work one must read as much as is necessary to appreciate it: one must know the language, understand the allusions, or at least the important allusions, appreciate the nuances. But once one can do that, it is the great work, not the commentary that matters.

Perhaps this is because obesophobia is often a fatly-disguised form of snobbery. In most rich nations, obesity rates are much higher at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.

οἱ παχέες men of substance, the wealthy, Hdt. 5.30,77, 6.91; "τοὺς π. καὶ πλουσίους" Ar. Pax 639; ὃς ἂν ᾖ π. Id. Eq. 1139; ἀνὴρ π. Id. V. 287; cf. πάχης.

Of course a man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean: there is a great object of which he has no idea.

Conceive, if you can, my term,—eight weeks of it—not only pupils (that bane of a university) but these unabated climatic horrors.

My taste for literature had developed into a love of language, the word in isolation. At school my subjects were French and Spanish; and the pleasures of the language were at least as great as those of the literature. Maupassant and Molière were rich; but it was more agreeable to spend an hour with the big Harrap French-English dictionary, learning more of the language through examples, than with Corneille or Racine.

The fact was, I had no taste for scholarship, for tracing the growth of schools and trends. I sought continuously to relate literature to life. My training at school didn't help. We had few libraries, few histories of literature to turn to; and when we wrote essays on Tartuffe we wrote out of a direct response to the play. Now I discovered that the study of literature had been made scientific, that each writer had to be approached through the booby-traps of scholarship. There were the bound volumes of the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, affectionately referred to by old and knowing young as PMLA. The pages that told of Chaucer's knowledge of astronomy or astrology (the question came up every year) were black and bloated and furred with handling, and even some of the pencilled annotations (No, Norah!) had grown faint. I developed a physical distaste for these bound volumes and the libraries that housed them.

To be pelted with turnips when proconsul of Africa is no sign of dignity.<sup>2

2</sup> 4.3.

The chance of the lot then gave him Africa, which he governed with great justice and high honour, save that in a riot at Hadrumetum he was pelted with turnips.

Exim sortitus Africam integerrime nec sine magna dignatione administravit, nisi quod Hadrumeti seditione quadam rapa in eum iacta sunt.

(Agriculture) Of Peace, so dear to all mankind,
a faithful nurse, housekeeper, helper, steward,
daughter and sister: all these she had in me.
(B) So what is your name? (A) Mine? Agriculture.

(Γε.) τῆς πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποισιν Εἰρήνης φίλης
πιστὴ τροφός, ταμία, συνεργός, ἐπίτροπος,
θυγάτηρ, ἀδελφή· πάντα ταῦτ᾿ ἐχρῆτό μοι.
(B.) σοὶ δ᾿ ὄνομα δὴ τί ἐστιν; (Γε.) ὅ τι; Γεωργία.

The god existed: the faces and cries of the returning pilgrims carried this reassurance. I wished I was of their spirit. I wished that something of their joy awaited me at the end.

So I began to feel the pleasures of the religious meeting: the pleasures of brotherhood, union, formality, ritual, clothes, music, all combining to create a possibility of ecstasy.

He opened up the hole of his back alley
and expelled an idle blast through his bushy
crack, the type an old plow-ox lets loose.

ὁ δ᾿ ἀποστεγάσας τὸ τρῆμα τῆς ὄπισθε λαύρης
διὰ δενδροφόρου φάραγγος ἐξέωσε βροντὴν
ἠλέματον, ὁκοίην ἀροτὴρ γέρων χαλᾷ βοῦς.

Sotades states that Philinus uncovered his anus (evidently in order to defecate) and that, instead of being able to defecate, he merely farted loudly. In other words, Philinus tried to defecate but his efforts were vain: instead of defecating he merely managed to emit a vain πορδή (βροντὴν ἠλέματον). This explanation accounts for the epithet ἠλέματον, which until now had remained inexplicable.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Indians are an old people, and it might be that they continue to belong to the old world. That Indian reverence for the established and ancient, however awkward, however indefensible, however little understood: it is part of the serious buffoonery of Ancient Rome, an aspect of the Roman pietas. I had rejected tradition; yet how can I explain my feeling of outrage when I heard that in Bombay they used candles and electric bulbs for the Diwali festival, and not the rustic clay lamps, of immemorial design, which in Trinidad we still used? I had been born an unbeliever. Yet the thought of the decay of the old customs and reverences saddened me ...

You will notice in the ordinary language of ancient writers a characteristic which throws light on this aspect of Greek life. Non-Hellenic nations are nearly always spoken of by their tribes or races—'Ethnè'—Pelasgians, Macedonians, Phoenicians; the Greeks are spoken of by their cities, or, what comes to the same thing, by their islands—Milesians, Phocaeans, Eretrians, Athenians. On the mainland it is the Polis or circuit wall that forms the essential boundary of the nation; in the case of the islands, Samos, Naxos, Aegina, it is the equivalent wall of sea. Every Greek community is like a garrison of civilization amid wide hordes of barbarians; a picked body of men, of whom each individual has in some sense to live up to a higher standard than can be expected of the common human animal. As the shield is the typical weapon of the Greek warrior, so the wall is the typical mark of Greek civilization.

I will add the rest of what I have to say about my friend, that he was skilled in all kinds of music, but principally pipe-music; was a well-considered poet in his own tongue; had read several books both in French and English; was a dead shot, a good angler, and an excellent fencer with the small sword as well as with his own particular weapon.

'Clerkly skill'; learning, scholarship, science. Obsolete except in proverb (quot. 1699, 1822).

[....]

1699 B. E. New Dict. Canting Crew at Clerk-ship    An Ounce of Mother-Wit is worth a Pound of Clergy, or Book-learning.

1822 S. SMITH Wks. (1859) II. 3/1    The old saying, that an ounce of mother wit is worth a pound of clergy.

Learned men as a body, scholars.

a1834 S. T. Coleridge Lit. Remains (1836) I. 238    After the Revolution..a learned body, or clerisy, as such, gradually disappeared.

The Clerisy of the nation (a far apter exponent of the thing meant, than the term which the usus et norma loquendi forces on me), the clerisy, I say, or national church, in its primary acceptation and original intention comprehended the learned of all denominations;—the sages and professors of law and jurisprudence; of medicine and physiology; of music; of military and civil architecure; of the physical sciences; with the mathematical as the common organ of the preceding; in short, all the so called liberal arts and sciences, the possession and application of which constitute the civilization of a country, as well as the Theological.

What's the matter? Have you breakfasted on plums?

τί τὸ κακόν; ἀλλ᾿ ἦ κοκκύμηλ᾿ ἠκρατίσω;

We ate certain food, performed certain ceremonies and had certain taboos; we expected others to have their own. We did not wish to share theirs; we did not expect them to share ours. They were what they were; we were what we were.

Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal. We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature; but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order once fall apart and anarchy supervenes it reveals itself for what it is.

Der Mensch ist im Grunde ein wildes, entsetzliches Thier. Wir kennen es bloß im Zustande der Bändigung und Zähmung, welcher Civilisation heißt: daher erschrecken uns die gelegentlichen Ausbrüche seiner Natur. Aber wo und wann einmal Schloß und Kette der gesetzlichen Ordnung abfallen und Anarchie eintritt, da zeigt sich was er ist.

"But what good came of it at last?"
    Quoth little Peterkin.
"Why that I cannot tell," said he,
    "But 'twas a famous victory."

I know that the poor and the rich
The wise and the foolish, the priests and the laymen
The nobles, the serfs, the generous, the mean
Small and great, handsome and ugly
Ladies in upturned collars
No matter what their rank
Whether in kerchiefs or bourrelets
Death seizes them without exception.

311 bourrelets: A bourrelet was a sort of headdress indicative of a woman's station in life.

Je congnois que povres et riches
Sages et folz, prestres et laiz
Nobles, villains, larges et chiches
Petiz et grans et beaulx et laiz
Dames а rebrassez colletz
De quelconque condicion
Portans atours et bourreletz
Mort saisit sans exception.

My experience is the same as every man's:
I feel no disgrace in loving myself above all.

κεῖνο γὰρ πέπονθ᾿ ὅπερ πάντες βροτοί·
φιλῶν μάλιστ᾿ ἐμαυτὸν οὐκ αἰσχύνομαι.

A more canting, lying, thievish race than the Roman was never suffered by the Master of history to run so long a career on His footstool; and the sympathies of every generous soul must always be with their antagonists, whether those antagonists were nations or individuals—the Latins, whom they cheated out of their "reserved rights," or the Samnites, whom they crushed by brute force; Hannibal, the Lybian lion, or Mithridates, the Pontic fox. In all the wearisome annals of the Republic there is but one great man, and him they killed; in all their verse-manufactory there is but one great poet, and he wasted his talents on the dullest of themes and died a maniac; and moreover, it must be remembered that both Caesar and Lucretius belong to the period of transition from the Republic to the Empire.

Sussex Puritans made heavy use of hortatory names such as Be-courteous Cole (in the Parish of Pevensey), Safely-on-high Snat (Uckfield), Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith White (Ewhurst), Small-hope Biggs (Rye), Humiliation Scratcher (Westham), Kill-sin Pemble (also Westham), and Mortifie Hicks (Hailsham). A classic example was an unfortunate young woman named ffly fornication Bull, of Hailsham, Sussex, who was made pregnant in the shop of a yeoman improbably called Goodman Woodman.

A silver-footed maiden was bathing, letting the water fall on the golden apples of her breasts, with flesh like curdled milk. Her rounded buttocks, their flesh more fluid than water, gyrated back and forth. Her outspread hand covered the swelling Eurotas—not all of it, but as much as it could.

Παρθένος ἀργυρόπεζος ἐλούετο, χρύσεα μαζῶν
    χρωτὶ γαλακτοπαγεῖ μῆλα διαινομένη·
πυγαὶ δ᾽ ἀλλήλαις περιηγέες εἱλίσσοντο,
    ὕδατος ὑγροτέρῳ χρωτὶ σαλευόμεναι·
τὸν δ᾽ ὑπεροιδαίνοντα κατέσκεπε πεπταμένη χεὶρ        5
    οὐχ ὅλον Εὐρώταν, ἀλλ᾽ ὅσον ἠδύνατο.

Shut up, shut up, you, and stop your sleazy mud-slinging!

παῦ᾿ παῦ᾿, οὗτος, καὶ μὴ σκέρβολλε πονηρά.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers,—under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side,—the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true.

Every step forward, every form of dynamism, entails something satanic: "progress" is the modern equivalent of the Fall, the profane version of damnation. And those who believe in it are its promoters—in other words, all of us, for what are we but an army of the damned, predestined to the foul, to these machines, to these cities of which only an exhaustive catastrophe could rid us?

Tout pas en avant, toute forme de dynamisme comporte quelque chose de satanique: le «progrès» est l'équivalent moderne de la Chute, la version profane de la damnation. Et ceux qui y croient et en sont les promoteurs, nous tous en définitive, que sommes-nous sinon des réprouvés en marche, prédestinés à l'immonde, à ces machines, à ces villes, dont seul un désastre exhaustif pourrait nous débarrasser.

Who in our day can penetrate the hearts of the Ancients? Who can bring to light and life again minds long since removed in death? Who can elicit their meaning? A divine task that—not human!

Quis enim tempestate nostra antiquorum queat terebrare pectora et mentes excutere, in vitam aliam iam diu a mortali segregatas, et, quos habuere, sensus elicere? Esset edepol divinum potius quam humanum!

You belong to a party, my friend. That is to say, you have to applaud or vilify though it goes against the grain. The party insists on it.

Vous êtes d'un parti, mon ami, c'est-à-dire que vous applaudissez ou injuriez contre votre coeur. Le parti le veut.

I hate books, they are an usurpation & impertinence. I cannot once go home to truth & Nature for this perpetual clatter of words & dust of libraries. Yet take me at my word & burn my books &, like poor Petrarch, I might come to insanity for want of this fine wine of the gods.

Finally, the old vernacular names for plants and animals were disliked because they were thought too coarse. Anyone who wants evidence of the way in which polite sensibilities have changed with the centuries need only consider the briskly anatomical nature of this now suppressed terminology, for in the seventeenth-century countryside there grew black maidenhair, naked ladies, pissabed (or shitabed), mares fart and priest's ballocks. In the herb garden could be found horse pistle and prick madam; while in the orchard the open arse (or medlar) was a popular fruit. Even the black beetle was twitch-ballock and the long-tailed titmouse bum-towel. Many of today's more fanciful flower names — lords and ladies, for example — are deliberate inventions of the nineteenth century, designed to obliterate some unacceptable indecency of the past; and some present-day survivors still conceal a grosser meaning given them by liberal shepherds in bygone days. The mid eighteenth century was a transitional period, when bowdlerization had begun, but not been completed. Even so genteel a figure as Robert Smith, official rat-catcher to George II's daughter, the Princess Amelia, could occasionally drop his guard, as when he refers in the cold print of his book on how to catch vermin (1768) to a bird called 'the large brown, white arse, ring-tailed hawk'. But then he lived in an age when Wittenham Clumps, those pleasant twin hills in Berkshire, were still known (after the local landowner's wife) as Mrs Dunch's buttocks.

Then I wiped my bum on a hen, a cock, a pullet, on calf-skin, on the pelt of a hare, on a pigeon, a cormorant, a lawyer's bundle, a woollen hood, a night-cap and a stuffed decoy-bird.

But to conclude: I affirm and maintain that there is no bottom-wiper like a downy young goose, provided that you hold its head between your legs. Believe me on my honour, for you can feel in your bumhole a mirifical voluptuousness, as much from the softness of its down as from the temperate heat of the young goose which is readily communicated to the arse-gut and the rest of the intestines until it reaches the region of the heart and the brain. And do not believe that the blessedness of the heroes and demi-gods in the Elysian Fields lies in their nectar, asphodel or ambrosia, as these old women would maintain: in my opinion it consists in the fact that they wipe their bums on a young goose.

We want to praise our forebears for
being gentlemen worthy of this land and the Robe,
who in infantry battles and naval expeditions
were always victorious everywhere and adorned our city.

εὐλογῆσαι βουλόμεσθα τοὺς πατέρας ἡμῶν, ὅτι
ἄνδρες ἦσαν τῆσδε τῆς γῆς ἄξιοι καὶ τοῦ πέπλου,
οἵτινες πεζαῖς μάχαισιν ἔν τε ναυφάρκτῳ στρατῷ
πανταχοῦ νικῶντες ἀεὶ τήνδ᾿ ἐκόσμησαν πόλιν.

[T]he robe (peplos) which was borne in procession and offered to Athena at the annual festival of the Panathenaea was embroidered with mythological scenes such as the battle of the gods and Titans (cf. Eur. Hec. 466-474, Pl. Euthph. 6b-c); thus "worthy of <being depicted on> the peplos" means "superhuman, heroic".

The true way to be interesting is to smack of the soil, — to be Spartan, to be Treviran, to be American. Your cosmopolitan is one of your transportable fruits, your transportable wines, your translatable poets.

The man whose love for his country knows no local root, is a man whose love for his country is a poor abstraction...

Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he envies your vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas or slogans, your blissful incapacity to commit yourself. Blushing in secret for belonging to a sect or a party, ashamed of possessing a truth and of being enslaved by it, it is not his acknowledged enemies he resents, those who profess another, but you, the Indifferent, guilty of pursuing none. And if, in order to escape the servitude into which he has fallen, you seek refuge in vagueness or caprice, he will do everything in his power to forestall you, to hold you in a thrall analogous and, if possible, identical to his own.

Dès que quelqu'un se laisse prendre à une certitude, il jalouse vos opinions flottantes, votre résistance aux dogmes ou aux slogans, votre bienheureuse incapacité de vous y inféoder. Rougissant en secret d'appartenir à une secte ou à un parti, honteux de posséder une vérité et de s'y être asservi, il n'en voudra pas à ses ennemis déclarés, à ceux qui en détiennent une autre, mais à vous, à l'Indifférent, coupable de n'en poursuivre aucune. Pour fuir l'esclavage où il est tombé, cherchez-vous refuge dans le caprice ou l'approximation? Il mettra tout en oeuvre pour vous en empêcher, pour vous con-traindre à une servitude analogue, et, si possible, identique à la sienne.

Washington and Lee University was the first institution in this country to adopt the Roman pronunciation of Latin. This was in 1868, and due to Humphreys. The head of the department (Professor Harris) had told him he might investigate the subject and adopt what he should believe to have been the pronunciation of Cicero. Humphreys did so, but when the professor attended an oral at the intermediate examination he was amazed, and wanted Humphreys to abandon the "new-fangled pronunciation." But this Humphreys refused to do. He had already met ridicule enough from his students, e.g., the nickname of "old Keeckero Kaisar." He taught all the students of the first two years, i.e., four-fifths of those who went on into advanced Latin, and these, having become accustomed to the Roman pronunciation, refused to change when they reached Professor Harris. "I have had some fights in my life of which I am wont to boast," says Humphreys, "as when, from sunset till dark, with one three-inch rifle I fought at 400-500 yards range nine pieces of artillery under Colonel DuPont (five of them belonging to the regular army); but the fight of my life that required most moral courage was c=k, j=y, v=w in Latin, with the influence of my full professor against me."

[I]t were not only foolish but criminal to measure a professor's efficiency simply by his written work. There is often a sublime self-denial in the resolute concentration of a teacher on the business of the class-room; and the noiseless scholarship that leavens generation after generation of pupils is of more value to the world of letters than folios of pretentious erudition.

The great and legitimate aim of a business man is to make money, to provide for himself and his family such luxuries and comforts as his taste and social standing demand. But when a man has reached the goal of his desires, when he has made his pile and wants to enjoy it, then comes the time for the making of the real and only balance sheet. Then he must ask himself, "What are my resources, now that I have everything that money can buy? What are my spiritual and intellectual assets? How can I best spend what is left to me of life?" Lucky is the man whose early training fits him for something more than the golf-field, or the tennis-court, and for something better than the gaming-table when his days of business activity are over. He can taste the gentler pleasures that await him in his study and by the blazing hearth-fire. His Sophocles or his Horace or his Catullus will make the winter of life seem like its early spring when the greatest struggle he knew was with the elusive rules of grammar and syntax.

This pamphlet also contains a litany in which the titles of the archangel are enumerated. He is, among other things, Secretary of God, Liberator from Infernal Chains, Defender in the Hour of Death, Custodian of the Pope, Spirit of Light, Wisest of Magistrates, Terror of Demons, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the Lord, Lash of Heresies, Adorer of the Word Incarnate, Guide of Pilgrims, Conductor of Mortals: Mars, Mercury, Hercules, Apollo, Mithra—what nobler ancestry can angel desire? And yet, as if these complicated and responsible functions did not suffice for his energies, he has twenty others, among them being that of "Custodian of the Holy Family"—who apparently need a protector, a Monsieur Paoli, like any mortal royalties.

"Blasphemous rubbish!" I can hear some Methodist exclaiming. And one may well be tempted to sneer at those pilgrims for the more enlightened of whom such literature is printed. For they are unquestionably a repulsive crowd: travel-stained old women, under-studies for the Witch of Endor; dishevelled, anaemic and dazed-looking girls; boys, too weak to handle a spade at home, pathetically uncouth, with mouths agape and eyes expressing every grade of uncontrolled emotion—from wildest joy to downright idiotcy. How one realizes, down in this cavern, the effect upon some cultured ancient like Rutilius Namatianus of the catacomb-worship among those early Christian converts, those men who shun the light, drawn as they were from the same social classes towards the same dark underground rites! One can neither love nor respect such people; and to affect pity for them would be more consonant with their religion than with my own.

But it is perfectly easy to understand them. For thirteen centuries this pilgrim-movement has been going on. Thirteen centuries? No. This site was an oracle in heathen days, and we know that such were frequented by men not a whit less barbarous and bigoted than their modern representatives—nothing is a greater mistake than to suppose that the crowds of old Rome and Athens were more refined than our own ("Demosthenes, sir, was talking to an assembly of brutes"). For thirty centuries then, let us say, a deity has attracted the faithful to his shrine—Sant'Angelo has become a vacuum, as it were, which must be periodically filled up from the surrounding country. These pilgrimages are in the blood of the people: infants, they are carried there; adults, they carry their own offspring; grey-beards, their tottering steps are still supported by kindly and sturdier fellow-wanderers.

Popes and emperors no longer scramble up these slopes; the spirit of piety has abated among the great ones of the earth; so much is certain. But the rays of light that strike the topmost branches have not yet penetrated to the rank and seething undergrowth. And then—what else can one offer to these Abruzzi mountain-folk? Their life is one of miserable, revolting destitution. They have no games or sports, no local racing, clubs, cattle-shows, fox-hunting, politics, rat-catching, or any of those other joys that diversify the lives of our peasantry. No touch of humanity reaches them, no kindly dames send them jellies or blankets, no cheery doctor enquires for their children; they read no newspapers or books, and lack even the mild excitements of church versus chapel, or the vicar's daughter's love-affair, or the squire's latest row with his lady—nothing! Their existence is almost bestial in its blankness. I know them—I have lived among them. For four months in the year they are cooped up in damp dens, not to be called chambers, where an Englishman would deem it infamous to keep a dog—cooped up amid squalor that must be seen to be believed; for the rest of the time they struggle, in the sweat of their brow, to wrest a few blades of corn from the ungrateful limestone. Their visits to the archangel—these vernal and autumnal picnics—are their sole form of amusement.

The movement is said to have diminished since the early nineties, when thirty thousand of them used to come here annually. It may well be the case; but I imagine that this is due not so much to increasing enlightenment as to the depopulation caused by America; many villages have recently been reduced to half their former number of inhabitants.

And here they kneel, candle in hand, on the wet flags of this foetid and malodorous cave, gazing in rapture upon the blandly beaming idol, their sensibilities tickled by resplendent priests reciting full-mouthed Latin phrases, while the organ overhead plays wheezy extracts from "La Forza del Destino" or the Waltz out of Boito's "Mefistofele "... for sure, it must be a foretaste of Heaven! And likely enough, these are "the poor in heart" for whom that kingdom is reserved.

One may call this a debased form of Christianity. Whether it would have been distasteful to the feelings of the founder of that cult is another question, and, debased or not, it is at least alive and palpitating, which is more than can be said of certain other varieties.

It was a rather long journey for a day’s outing but curiosity got the better of me (as it invariably does) and we made our way up to Gargano peninsula yesterday to the shrine of St Michael at Monte Sant'Angelo that Norman Douglas is so entertainingly scathing about in the early chapters of Old Calabria. He witnessed a repulsive medley of "travel-stained old women, under-studies for the Witch of Endor; dishevelled anaemic, and dazed-looking girls; boys too weak to handle a spade at home, pathetically uncouth, with mouths agape and eyes expressing every grade of uncontrolled emotion – from wildest joy to downright idiocy". And how they all stank, he tells us forthrightly, more than once ("And here they kneel, candle in hand, on the wet flags of this foetid and malodorous cave, gazing in rapture upon the blandly beaming idol, their sensibilities tickled by resplendent priests reciting full-mouthed Latin phrases, while the organ overhead plays wheezy extracts from La Forza del Destino or the Waltz out of Boito's Mefistofele ... for sure, it must be a foretaste of heaven!")

All gone to their graves. There were one or two that from their pious demeanour you might be tempted to dub pilgrims but my impression was that the majority, and they were not many, were just glaikit tourists like ourselves and less than fervent in their devotions to the Archangel, whose shares have generally been trading low in the 21st century. No disrespect intended. Gabriel and Rafael must feel equally aggrieved at dwindling cult-status.

It's curious that you should post something about St Michael's footprints in Rome. Anyone who wishes to see the real thing should visit Monte Sant'Angelo, where an Archangelic foot was firmly imprinted into the rock and on display, plain for all to see and never to be confused with any earlier heathen grotto-dwelling deity. After all, Pan's feet were cloven.

On the way north, we stopped off at bilingual Canusium (Canosa) of the gritty bread, one of the oldest settlements in Puglia, as they say that it was founded by Diomedes after the Trojan War, and no sane Italophile should have any reason to doubt it. The Via Minucia followed by Horace & Vergil and their party crosses the river Ofanto just outside the town and the Roman bridge there is intact though much overlaid with mediaeval repair work. We crossed and recrosssed, peered and gazed, assuring ourselves that pace Heraclitus, it was the same river and grosso modo the very same bridge that they crossed.