Laudator Temporis Acti

Joseph Edward Harry (1863-1949), Greek Tragedy: Emendations, Interpretations and Critical Notes, Vol. I: Aeschylus and Sophocles (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), p. xii:

The greatest encouragement I received from Gilbert Murray and from my friends and colleagues at the Sorbonne—Croiset, Girard, and Haussoullier. To their kind words and heartening letters I owe more than to anything else, for they stimulated me to continue in the delicate but gigantic task of constituting the text of the "Great Three" and of publishing an annotated edition of the supreme dramatic artists of the world. To do this properly, I was obliged to transcribe the thirty-three plays in my own handwriting, so as to become more familiar with the style, syntax, and vocabulary of each, and to leave ample space for my corrections of the text and for marginal notes. That Demosthenes copied Thucydides eight times is probably fiction; but we know that Charles Nodier copied the whole of Rabelais three times in manuscript, in order to learn something about the use of his native tongue.

Id., p. xv:

The sharp criticism of those working in the same field and the biting sarcasm, not to say snappishness, in which a few of the viri docti eique haud ignobiles in England and Germany, and sometimes in America, are wont to indulge, is out of place in the sphere of classical scholarship; it savors too much of the savants that Rabelais liked to satirize: "Dost thou think thou'rt in the wilderness of your foolish university, wrangling and bawling among the idle wandering searchers and hunters after truth?" Courage of conviction is not incompatible with urbanity of good breeding.