Wednesday, December 28, 2022
Dry Husks
William Osler (1849-1919), Thomas Linacre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), p. 29:
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Fed to inanition on the dry husks of grammar and with bitter school-boy memories of Farrar on the Greek verb, I can never pick up a text-book on the subject without a regret that the quickening spirit of Greece and Rome should have been for generations killed by the letter with which alone these works are concerned. It has been a great comfort to know that neither "Pindar nor Aeschylus had the faintest conception of these matters and that neither knew what was meant by an adverb or preposition or the rules of the moods and tenses" (Gomperz).
