Laudator Temporis Acti

Ward W. Briggs Jr., Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), pp. 3-4 (brackets in original):

Gildersleeve said, "I have virtually thought in Greek ever since [the age of five],"¹⁰ but he developed prodigious reading habits in other languages, too. He began reading between the ages of three and four and in the same year that he read John's Gospel in Greek, he read the entire Bible "from cover to cover."¹¹ Before the age of fifteen he had read "all Caesar's Gallic War, all Vergil, all Horace, a number of Cicero's Orations, the Laelius and the Cato, Sallust, Juvenal, parts of Tacitus."¹² He read Corneille, Racine, and Molière, and Cervantes and Dante. His father loved Milton, but not the "immoral" Shakespeare, nor any novels by anyone, including the South's beloved Sir Walter Scott, though young Basil got round his father's wishes thanks to an indulgent uncle and the Scottish librarian at the Apprentices' Library.¹³ In his two years in Princeton's class of 1849, between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, he first encountered "the most important of all the teachers I ever had," Goethe. He describes the period as one of "Teutonomania": "Goethe's aphorisms were my daily food. I committed my favorite passages to memory. I repeated them over and over to myself in my long solitary rambles, and Goethe was my mainstay at a time when my faith had suffered an eclipse. . . . I read German, wrote German, listened to German, and even talked German—to myself if I could not find any long-suffering German to submit to my experiments."¹⁴ It was no surprise that Gildersleeve, disgusted by what he considered the low quality of his education in America and quickened by this consuming love of Goethe and things German, decided at Princeton to further his education in Germany.

10. Columbia State (S.C.), 30 Nov. 1919: 9.

11. AJP 5 (1884): 341.

12. "A Novice of 1830," 79. See also "Formative Influences," 39.

13. "Formative Influences," 40-41.

14. "Formative Influences," 45.