Laudator Temporis Acti

Infatuation with Greek

2012-02-01T05:31:00.002-06:00

Molière, The Learned Women (Les Femmes Savantes), Act III, Scene 3 (tr. Donald M. Frame):

PHILAMINTE. Good Heavens, Greek, Greek! Sister, he knows Greek!
BÉLISE. My niece, Greek!
ARMANDE. Greek! How lovely! How unique!
PHILAMINTE. The gentleman knows Greek? Let each of us, Sir, for the love of Greek, embrace you—thus.

****
PHILAMINTE. Du grec, Ô Ciel! du grec! Il sait du grec, ma soeur!
BÉLISE. Ah, ma nièce, du grec!
ARMANDE. Du grec! quelle douceur!
PHILAMINTE. Quoi? Monsieur sait du grec? Ah! permettez, de grâce, que pour l'amour du grec, Monsieur, on vous embrasse.

Richard Steele, The Spectator, no. 278 (Friday, January 18, 1712, quoting a supposed letter from a shop-keeper):

My Wife at the Beginning of our Establishment shewed her self very assisting to me in my Business as much as could lie in her Way, and I have Reason to believe 'twas with her Inclination; but of late she has got acquainted with a Schoolman, who values himself for his great Knowledge in the Greek Tongue. He entertains her frequently in the Shop with Discourses of the Beauties and Excellencies of that Language; and repeats to her several Passages out of the Greek Poets, wherein he tells her there is unspeakable Harmony and agreeable Sounds that all other Languages are wholly unacquainted with. He has so infatuated her with his Jargon, that instead of using her former Diligence in the Shop, she now neglects the Affairs of the House, and is wholly taken up with her Tutor in learning by Heart Scraps of Greek, which she vents upon all Occasions. She told me some Days ago, that whereas I use some Latin Inscriptions in my Shop, she advised me with a great deal of Concern to have them changed into Greek; it being a Language less understood, would be more conformable to the Mystery of my Profession; that our good Friend would be assisting to us in this Work; and that a certain Faculty of Gentlemen would find themselves so much obliged to me, that they would infallibly make my Fortune: In short her frequent Importunities upon this and other Impertinences of the like Nature make me very uneasy; and if your Remonstrances have no more Effect upon her than mine, I am afraid I shall be obliged to ruin my self to procure her a Settlement at Oxford with her Tutor, for she's already too mad for Bedlam.

The Depredations of Madame de Bérenger

2012-02-01T05:10:00.002-06:00

Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand: A Group Translation Edited by Thelma Jurgrau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 565-566 (Part III, Chapter V):

Mme. de Bérenger stayed with us for six weeks, I believe, and left only when my grandmother was completely out of danger. But if this lady felt any distress of concern it did not show much, and I doubt that her heart was really touched. I honestly do not know why my grandmama, who had such great need for affection, had become so particularly attached to this haughty, imperious woman, in whom I have never been able to discover the least charm of mind or character.

She was very active and unable to stay still. She considered herself an expert at planning or improving the design of a garden or park, and no sooner had she seen our formal garden than she got it into her head to transform it into an English landscape—a preposterous idea—for on a flat terrain, without much of a view, and where trees are slow to grow, the best thing to do is conserve at all possible cost those which happen to be there; to plant for the future, not create clearings which show you the poverty of the surrounding lines of vision; and above all, especially when the road is right out front and very close to the house, to screen yourself as much possible behind walls or hedges, to preserve your privacy. But our hedges horrified Mme. de Bérenger, our square beds of flowers and vegetables, which seemed so beautiful and bright to me, she called a cabbage patch. Emerging from the first crisis of her illness, hardly had my grandmother regained her voice and hearing than her friend asked for permission to set the axe to the little woods and the pick and shovel to the paths. My grandmother was not fond of change, but her will was so weak at that moment (and besides, Mme. de Bérenger exerted such influence on her) that she gave her free rein.

So there we have that fine lady in action—she summons a score of workmen, and from her window directs the clearing operation, pruning here, destroying there, and always seeking a view which is nowhere to be found, for good reason: nothing can change the fact that, while the countryside is pretty enough from the second-storey window, when you are in the garden—on a level with the countryside—you see it flat and without panorama. To fulfil her desire, it would have been necessary to raise the earth in the garden by fifty feet. Each opening cut in the beds and tree clumps resulted only in our being able to enjoy the view of a vast, cultivated plain. The breach was growing larger; fine old trees that had no say in the matter were being cut down; Mme. de Bérenger drew patterns on paper, passed them from her window along a line of string to the workers, shouted after them, went upstairs, came downstairs, went back upstairs, lost her patience, and destroyed the little shade we had, without any profit in the exchange. At last she gave it up, thank God, for she could have made a clean sweep, but Deschartres pointed out to her that my grandmother, once she was well enough to go out and see for herself might perhaps miss her old hedges a great deal.

I was struck by the manner in which that lady spoke to the workmen. She was far too eminent to condescend to find out their names and deal with them as individuals. However, from her window she had dealings with each one in turn, and nothing in the world would have made her say "sir," or "my friend," or "old man," as they say in Berry, regardless of the age of the male you are addressing. She shouted to them at the top of her lungs, "Man Number Two!" "Listen, Man Number Four!" This caused gales of laughter among our quizzical peasants, but not one budged or turned his head in her direction. "By gum", they said to each other shrugging their shoulders, "we're all of us men, and we can't guess which one she's after—that woman."

It took some thirty years to undo the havoc wrought on our property by Mme. de Bérenger and to close off the openings for her "vistas."

The French, from George Sand, Histoire de Ma Vie (Paris, 1855), IV, 111-114:

Madame de Béranger resta, je crois, six semaines avec nous, et ne partit que lorsque ma grand'mère fut hors de tout danger. Mais cette dame, si elle eut du chagrin ou de l'inquiétude, ne le fit pas beaucoup paraître, et je doute qu'elle eût le coeur bien tendre. Je ne sais, en vérité, pourquoi ma bonne maman, qui avait un si grand besoin de tendresse, s'était particulièrement attachée à cette femme hautaine et impérieuse, en qui je n'ai jamais pu découvrir le moindre charme d'esprit ou de caractère.

Elle était fort active et ne pouvait rester en place. Elle se croyait très habile à lever ou à rectifier le plan d'un jardin ou d'un parc, et elle n'eut pas plutôt vu notre vieux jardin régulier, qu'elle se mit en tête de le transformer en paysage anglais; c'était une idée saugrenue, car, sur un terrain plat, ayant peu de vue, et où les arbres sont très lents à pousser, ce qu'il y a de mieux à faire, c'est de conserver précieusement ceux qui s'y trouvent, de planter pour l'avenir, de ne point ouvrir de clairières qui vous montrent la pauvreté des lignes environnantes; c'est surtout, lorsqu'on a la route en face et tout près de la maison, de se renfermer autant que possible derrière des murs ou des charmilles pour être chez soi. Mais nos charmilles faisaient horreur à madame de Béranger, nos carrés de fleurs et de légumes, qui me paraissaient si beaux et si riants, elle les traitait de jardin de curé. Ma grand'mère, au sortir de la première crise de son mal, avait à peine recouvré la voix et l'ouïe, que son amie lui demanda l'autorisation de mettre la cognée dans le petit bois et la pioche dans les allées. Ma grand'mère n'aimait pas le changement, mais elle avait la tête si faible en ce moment, et d'ailleurs madame de Béranger exerçait sur elle une telle domination, qu'elle lui donna pleins pouvoirs.

Voilà donc cette bonne dame à l'oeuvre; elle mande une vingtaine d'ouvriers, et de sa fenêtre dirigé l'abattage, élaguant ici, détruisant là, et cherchant toujours un point de vue qui ne se trouva jamais, parce que, si des fenêtres du premier étage de la maison la campagne est assez jolie, rien ne peut faire que, dans ce jardin, de plain-pied avec cette campagne, on ne la voie pas de niveau et sans étendue. Il aurait fallu exhausser de cinquante pieds le sol du jardin, et chaque ouverture pratiquée dans les massifs n'aboutissait qu'à nous faire jouir de la vue d'une grande plaine labourée. On élargissait la brèche, on abattait de bons vieux arbres qui n'en pouvaient mais; madame de Béranger traçait des lignes sur le papier, tendait de sa fenêtre des ficelles aux ouvriers, criait après eux, montait, descendait, retournait, s'impatientait et détruisait le peu d'ombrage que nous avions, sans nous faire rien gagner en échange. Enfin elle y renonça, Dieu merci, car elle eût pu faire table rase; mais Deschartres lui observa que ma grand'mère, dès qu'elle serait en état de sortir et de voir par ses yeux, regretterait peut-être beaucoup ses vieilles charmilles.

Je fus très frappée de la manière dont cette dame parlait aux ouvriers. Elle était beaucoup trop illustre pour daigner s'enquérir de leurs noms et pour les interpeller en particulier. Cependant elle avait affaire de sa fenêtre à chacun d'eux tour à tour, et pour rien au monde elle ne leur eût dit: «Monsieur, ou mon ami, ou mon vieux,» comme on dit, en Berry, quel que soit l'âge de l'être masculin auquel on s'adresse. Elle leur criait donc à tue-tête: «L'homme numéro 2! Ecoutez, l'homme numéro 4!» Cela faisait grandement rire nos paysans narquois, et aucun ne se dérangeait ni né tournait la tête de son côté. «Pardi!» se disaient-ils les uns aux autres en levant les épaules, «nous sommes bien tous des hommes, et nous ne pouvons pas deviner à qui elle en a, la femme!»

Il a fallu une trentaine d'années pour faire disparaître le dégât causé chez nous par madame de Béranger, et pour refermer les brèches de ses points de vue.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Something in Us Wouldn't Let Them Live

2012-02-01T05:06:00.002-06:00

Jonathan Galassi, Elms, in The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World since 1953 (New York: Picador, 2004), p. 38:

to a teacher

Your "yet-to-be-dismantled" elms are few,
and by the time you read this may be gone.
In my own childhood we had one or two
that framed the lawn before the hurricane,
trees that were far too noble to survive
a time like ours, too slender or too sublime.
Something in us wouldn't let them live.

Or was it only that they'd served their time?
"The size of our abidance" wasn't theirs,
the way it can't be yours. That is a trait
of nature, as it is a trait of ours
to see in something passing something great:
our backwardlookingness that makes a tree
the genius of the place it cannot be.

The "teacher" is Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), and the quotations come from the closing lines of her Poem, which can be found in Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, Prose, and Letters (The Library of America, 2008), pp. 164-166 (at 166):

Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how live, how touching in detail
—the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

Hat tip: Jescie.

Dens and Depths

2012-01-31T07:17:00.001-06:00

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), The French Revolution (London: The Colonial Press, 1900), II, 123-125:

From the purpose of crime to the act of crime there is an abyss; wonderful to think of. The finger lies on the pistol; but the man is not yet a murderer: nay his whole nature staggering at such consummation, is there not a confused pause rather,—one last instant of possibility for him? Not yet a murderer; it is at the mercy of light trifles whether the most fixed idea may not yet become unfixed. One slight twitch of a muscle, the death-flash bursts; and he is it, and will for Eternity be it; and Earth has become a penal Tartarus for him; his horizon girdled now not with golden hope, but with red flames of remorse; voices from the depths of Nature sounding, Woe, woe on him!

Of such stuff are we all made; on such powder-mines of bottomless guilt and criminality,—"if God restrained not," as is well said,—does the purest of us walk. There are depths in man that go the length of lowest Hell, as there are heights that reach highest Heaven;—for are not both Heaven and Hell made out of him, made by him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery as he is?

....

Horrible the hour when man's soul, in its paroxysm, spurns asunder the barriers and rules; and shows what dens and depths are in it!

Aristocracy of the Moneybag

2012-01-31T07:01:00.001-06:00

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), The French Revolution (London: The Colonial Press, 1900), II, 366:

Aristocracy of Feudal Parchment has passed away with a mighty rushing; and now, by a natural course, we arrive at Aristocracy of the Moneybag. It is the course through which all European Societies are at this hour travelling. Apparently a still baser sort of Aristocracy? An infinitely baser; the basest yet known!

....

The Heavens cease not their bounty: they send us generous hearts into every generation. And now what generous heart can pretend to itself, or be hoodwinked into believing, that Loyalty to the Moneybag is a noble Loyalty? Mammon, cries the generous heart out of all ages and countries, is the basest of known Gods, even of known Devils.

Cartoon by William Gropper

The Best Life

2012-01-30T07:31:00.001-06:00

Diogenes Laertius 7.1.2 (on Zeno, tr. R.D. Hicks):

It is stated by Hecato and by Apollonius of Tyre in his first book on Zeno that he consulted the oracle to know what he should do to attain the best life, and that the god's response was that he should take on the complexion of the dead. Whereupon, perceiving what this meant, he studied ancient authors.

Ἑκάτων δέ φησι καὶ Ἀπολλώνιος ὁ Τύριος ἐν πρώτῳ Περὶ Ζήνωνος, χρηστηριασαμένου αὐτοῦ τί πράττων ἄριστα βιώσεται, ἀποκρίνασθαι τὸν θέον, εἰ συγχρωτίζοιτο τοῖς νεκροῖς· ὅθεν ξυνέντα τὰ τῶν ἀρχαίων ἀναγινώσκειν.

Over My Dead Body

2012-01-30T06:52:00.000-06:00

George A. Kennedy, Afterword: An Essay on Classics in America after the Yale Report, in Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), pp. 325-351 (at 342, footnote omitted):

William Howard Taft, a powerful member of the Yale Corporation, declared that Yale would abolish the Latin requirement over his dead body. He died in 1930 and the requirement died in 1931.

Newspapers

2012-01-30T06:47:00.002-06:00

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic 1.1.304-306:

The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villanous, licentious, abominable, infernal—Not that I ever read them. No, I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper.

Søren Kierkegaard, The Last Years: Journals 1853-1855, tr. R.G. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 98:

If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced, I should by no means give her up; but if I had a son who became a journalist, I should regard him as lost.

Song of the Vineyard Knife

2012-01-29T14:36:00.003-06:00

Clément Marot (1496-1544), Chanson XXXII, tr. R.N. Currey:

Song of the Vineyard Knife

Enough of love; let's leave for something new
All that to-do, and sing the vineyard knife;
No grower of vines but has recourse to you,
Makes use of you to prune his vines; O knife,
My vineyard knife, my little vineyard knife,
Renewing life, you make my good vines grow,
From which year after year the rich wines flow!

Vulcan, the high gods' blacksmith, did design
This shape divine, in heaven hammered out
The white-hot steel, and dipped it in old wine
To give the fine edge temper; and the shout
Bacchus gave out proclaimed beyond a doubt
That even devout old Noah could not find
A knife for pruning vines more to his mind.

With vine leaves crowned, young Bacchus brings his slim
Curved blade to trim and bless the fruitful vine;
With flagons old Silenus follows him
And from each rim, in one unbroken line,
Pours down the wine, tries dancing, lies supine;
And for a sign his nose is cherry-red;
Of his great family many men are bred.

Hilaire Belloc, Avril: Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance (London: Duckworth and Co., 1904), p. 111, commenting on this poem:

Here is Marot's best—even though many of his native critics will not admit it so; but to feel it in full one must be exiled from the vines.

It is a tapestry of the Renaissance; the jolly gods of the Renaissance, the old gods grown Catholic moving across a happier stage. Bacchus in long robes and with solemnity blessing the vine, Silenus and the hobbling smith who smithied the Serpe, the Holy Vineyard Knife in heaven, all these by their diction and their flavour recall the Autumn in Herault and the grapes under a pure sky, pale at the horizon, and labourers and their carts in the vineyard, and these set in the frame of that great time when Saturn did return.

All the poem is wine. It catches its rhymes and weaves them in and in, and moves rapid and careless in a fugue, like the march from Asia when the Panthers went before and drew the car. The internal rhythm and pulse is the clapping of hands in barns at evening and the peasants' feet dancing freely on the beaten earth. It is a very good song; it remembers the treading of the grapes and is refreshed by the mists that rise at evening when the labour is done.

The French:

Changeons propos, c'est trop chanté d'amours:
Ce sont clamours, chantons de la serpette:
Tous vignerons ont à elle recours.
C'est leur secours pour tailler la vignette;
O serpilette, ô la serpillonnette,
La vignolette est par toy mise sus,
Dont les bons vins tous les ans sont yssus.

Le dieu Vulcain, forgeron des haults dieux,
Forgea aux cieulx la serpe bien taillante,
De fin acier trempé en bon vin vieulx,
Pour tailler mieulx et estre plus vaillante.
Bacchus la vante, et dit qu'elle est séante
Et convenante à Noé le bon hom
Pour en tailler la vigne en la saison.

Bacchus alors chappeau de treille avoit,
Et arrivoit pour benistre la vigne;
Avec flascons Silenus le suyvoit,
Lequel beuvoit aussi droict qu'une ligne;
Puis il trepigne, et se faict une bigne;
Comme une guigne estoit rouge son nez;
Beaucoup de gens de sa race sont nez.

The Commandments

2012-01-29T07:06:00.001-06:00

Geoffrey Madan's Notebooks: A Selection, edd. J.A. Gere and John Sparrow (1981; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 91 (attributed to Elizabeth Bibesco):

American girl on the Commandments: 'They don't tell you what you ought to do: and they only put ideas into your head.'

Id., p. 94 (attributed to a "Country squire, after Mattins"):

Well, anyhow I haven't made a graven image.

Transcendental Ventriloquism

2012-01-28T08:45:00.000-06:00

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), Waste Books F.802:

Beware of that transcendental ventriloquism of the zealot, by means of which he makes you believe that something said on earth comes from heaven.

Fürchte dich vor jener transzendenten Ventriloquenz des Schwärmers, womit er dir glauben macht etwas was auf der Erde gesprochen ist käme vom Himmel.

Let Us Be Merry Before We Go

2012-01-28T08:43:00.003-06:00

John Philpot Curran (1750–1817), Let Us Be Merry Before We Go:

If sadly thinking, with spirits sinking,
    Could, more than drinking, my cares compose,
A cure for sorrow from sighs I'd borrow,
    And hope to-morrow would end my woes.
But as in wailing there's nought availing,
    And Death unfailing will strike the blow,
Then for that reason, and for a season,
    Let us be merry before we go!

To joy a stranger, a wayworn ranger,
    In every danger my course I've run;
Now hope all ending, and Death befriending,
    His last aid lending, my cares are done:
No more a rover, or hapless lover,
    My griefs are over, my glass runs low;
Then for that reason, and for a season,
    Let us be merry before we go!

By virtue of this song, John Philpot Curran has an apt middle name, which one could fancifully derive from Greek φιλοπότης (philopótēs) = lover of drinking.

Staunch Foes of Timber

2012-01-27T08:41:00.005-06:00

William Barnes (1801-1886), "Thoughts on Beauty and Art," Macmillan's Magazine (June 1861), reprinted as Appendix Four in Giles Dugdale, William Barnes of Dorset (London: Cassell & Company, 1953), pp. 276-298 (at 290-291):

I am sorry to find that farmers have become such staunch foes of timber, if not of winding streams. A farmer, at a late meeting, thought that all the timber that may be needful for a farm should be grown together on the poorest land. Whether by poorest soils he meant those that are thinnest of mould, or deepest in corn-starving ground, I do not know; but I should be sorry to lose all elms but the stunted ones that may withstand the blasts on a soil of chalk, under three or four inches of earth. But I do not think the baleful gloom of a tree-head, or the winding of its roots is an unamended evil. It will shield a good space of ground from a slanting hail-storm, or nipping stroke of wind; its leaves are vegetable elements, and its wood is of service, and it screens cattle, and checks the waste of body-heat, which is a waste of good. A man who had seen some cows in a cleared field in a hail-storm, ended his tale to me with the question, "Didden they zet their backs up?" If, however, I were a landowner, and had, in a well-formed landscape before my house, a fine tree, whose body was the very heart of a well-clustered composition, and whose head repeated the breadth of morning light that fell on its hillock; and if, in the evening, it outbore a breadth of shade in the foreground that upfilled a picture with cows or hay-makers beneath it—if it showed boughs of gold or russet in the autumn, or waved its crystal limbs in the snowy winter—I should be unwilling to give it up to the ruthless hand of Pluto for a few pence or shillings a year; for, if a joy from the beautiful is not worth money, why do we buy a ticket for a concert of music, or give money for a landscape scene on canvas or a panel?

Barnes' poems on the subject of arboricide include The Girt Woak Tree That's in the Dell and Vellèn o' the Tree. See also some anecdotes about Barnes' love of trees and distress at their unnecessary destruction in Lucy Baxter, The Life of William Barnes: Poet and Philologist, by his Daughter (London: Macmillan, 1887), pp. 67, 104-105.

Charles Branwhite (1817-1880),
A Hard Day's Work, Winter
Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Supply and Demand

2012-01-27T08:17:00.002-06:00

Lord Stowell (1745–1836), quoted in Geoffrey Madan's Notebooks: A Selection, edd. J.A. Gere and John Sparrow (1981; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 129:

If you provide a larger amount of highly cultivated talent than there is a demand for, the surplus is very likely to turn sour.

Did Adam Laugh Before the Fall?

2012-01-27T05:20:00.004-06:00

Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 249 (Saturday, December 15, 1711):

I have read a Sermon of a Conventual in the Church of Rome, on those Words of the Wise Man, I said of Laughter, it is mad; and of Mirth, what does it? Upon which he laid it down as a Point of Doctrine, that Laughter was the Effect of Original Sin, and that Adam could not laugh before the Fall.

The "Words of the Wise Man" come from Ecclesiastes 2.2.

Manfred Pfister, A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and Beyond (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), p. 52 (discussing Milton):

Having tried to account for God's and the fallen angels' laughter in Paradise Lost, we have to take a closer look at yet another set of protagonists. Do Adam and Eve laugh? They don't, since they live peacefully, fear no enemies and are in a state of utter contentment. There is no place and necessity for laughter in paradise. Prelapsarian mirth finds other ways of expression.

The Old Man of Verona

2012-01-26T07:33:00.006-06:00

Thanks to Karl Maurer for drawing my attention to three more translations of Claudian's Old Man of Verona, one from the 18th century and two from the 19th century.

Samuel Boyse (1708–1749), Translations and Poems Written on Several Subjects (Edinburgh: Thomas and Walter Ruddimans, 1731), pp. 17-18:

Happy the Man who free from Noise and Strife
In his own Grounds has past his peaceful Life;
And in his solitary Cottage blest,
Counts o'er the joyful Days he has possest;
Who ne'er for Fortune's Baits exchang'd Content,
Nor knew what Av'rice or Ambition meant,
Ne'er heard the Clamours of the crowded Town,
Or the Chicane of the litigious Gown;
But freed from War, and ignorant of Trade,
Defies all Storms that may his Rest invade:
And from the World retir’d, serene enjoys
The kindly Influence of his native Skies;
While by the Marks of Nature that appear,
He knows the Seasons of the changing Year;
Who walks and sleeps beneath the neighb'ring Wood,
That with himself coeval, long has stood
The waste of Time, and as the Stripling stray'd,
Receiv'd him oft beneath its friendly Shade:
To whom Verona seems the Indian Coasts
And the Red Sea in Benacus is lost;
While firm in Health, and in his Reason sound
He daily measures his paternal Ground,
And o'er his Body, like a pleasing Sleep,
Feels his old Age with soft Advances creep,
Till blest with all a mortal Wish can crave,
Unknown, unseen, he sinks into the Grave.

Let others boast of Triumphs and of Toils,
The Pride of Riches, and the Pomp of Spoils!
Compar'd with his, how trifling are their Joys?
They only taste that Life which he enjoys.

Anonymous, in The Port Folio, New Series, by Oliver Oldschool, Esq., Vol. VI, No. 1 (Philadelphia, Saturday, July 2, 1808), p. 31:

Happy the man, who, satisfied at home,
From his own dwelling never learnt to roam,
And bending now with age, on the same floor
Of native earth, on which he crawl’d of yore,
Marks with his staff, a calculation rude,
And tells the years his rural cot hath stood.
He with no rage of rambling folly curst,
E’er toil’d at barb’rous streams to slake his thirst,
For love of gain ne’er plough’d the wintry wave,
Nor risk’ed his life among the madly brave.
The bar he ne’er frequented, for he thought
That right by wrangling was too dearly bought.
Heedless of bustling life, e’en the next town,
With all its wealth and vice, to him is still unknown.
Looks he abroad? The scenery of the sky
An unbought pleasure offers to his eye:
By crops alternate, not by calendars,
He measures time, and ascertains the years.
In mellow fruits the fall is manifest,
Gay flow’rs the spring sufficiently attest,
And even the hours he practically knows,
Assign’d to food, to labour, or repose.
To him his fields appear to occupy
Th’extent of day, and meet the bending sky.
Proportion’d to his wish, his little round
He scans with joy, nor craves a larger bound;
Of things remote incurious, and at ease,
Repos’d beneath contemporary trees,
Fondly compares their period with his own,
Together young—together aged grown.

Charles Abraham Elton (1778-1853), Specimens of the Classic Poets, Vol. III (London: Robert Baldwin, 1814), pp. 293-294:

Blest is the man who, in his father's fields,
Has past an age of quiet. The same roof
That screen'd his cradle, yields a shelter now
To his grey hairs. He leans upon a staff,
Where, as a child, he crept along the ground;
And, in one cottage, he has number'd o'er
A length of years. Him Fortune has not drawn
Into her whirl of strange vicissitudes;
Nor has he drunk, with ever-changing home,
From unknown rivers. Never on the deep,
A merchant, has he trembled at the storm;
Nor, as a soldier, started at the blare
Of trumpets; nor endured the noisy strife
Of the hoarse-clamouring bar: of the great world
Simply unconscious. To the neighbouring town
A stranger, he enjoys the free expanse
Of open heaven. The old man marks his year,
Not by the names of Consuls, but computes
Time by his various crops: by apple notes
The autumns; by the blooming flower the spring.
From the same field he sees his daily sun
Go down, and lift again its reddening orb;
And, by his own contracted universe,
The rustic measures the vast light of day.
He well remembers that broad massive oak,
An acorn; and has seen the grove grow old,
Coeval with himself. Verona seems
To him more distant than the swarthy Ind:
He deems the lake Benacus like the shores
Of the red gulph. But his a vigour hale,
And unabated: he has now outlived
Three ages: though a grandsire, green in years,
With firm and sinewy arms. The traveler
May roam to farthest Spain: he more has known
Of earthly space; the old man more of life.

Thanks also to Karl Maurer for sharing his own translation (and note):

About the old man of Verona who has never left his suburb

Happy, who passed his life in his own fields,
        whose same house sees the boy and the old man;
who with his cane on sand whereon he crawled
        counts the long ages of a single hut.
No Fortune tugged him with her varied tumult.
        No mobile guest, he drank no unknown spring;
feared no commercial seas, or soldier’s war-horn,
        nor suffered lawsuits in a raucous Forum.
Free of affairs, not knowing the near city,
        he enjoys a freer sight of stars. By changes
in crops, not consuls, he computes the year;
        knows Fall by apples, Spring by her bright blossoms.
His same field buries, then brings back the sun.
        He measures each day by his clock of tasks; *
recalls the huge oak as a small seed; sees
        that his coeval woods have aged with him;
thinks near Verona farther than black Indians;
        that Lake Benacus is the Red Sea shore.
But strong and fresh he is; in his firm muscles
        three generations see a grandsire still robust.
Let someone else ransack the farthest Spaniards;
        this man has more life; that, a longer road.

*More lit., 'Rustic, he measures each day by his circle'; but this echoes, I suspect, or even alludes to, an enchanting sentence in Vergil, Geo. 2.401 f. labor actus in orbem / atque in se sua per uestigia uoluitur annus, i.e. (the vine-grower's) labor, even when finished, returns again, as the year revolves, stepping in its own footprints. The rustic life is a kind of treadmill, never, ever finished! Yet this brings peace, because our life thus coincides with the very order of the world. It has this in common with 'verse'! Both turn, turn, turn, in the same hard but divine treadmill.

I'm indebted to Ian Jackson for sending me a copy of "Claudian's Old Man of Verona: An Anthology of English Translations with a New Poem by Edwin Morgan," Translation and Literature 2 (1993) 87-97. I won't print Edwin Morgan's Scots version, at least not yet, because it requires some glosses. But here are some more translations included in the article.

John Beaumont, Bosworth-Field, With a Taste of the Variety of Other Poems (London: Printed by Felix Kyngston for Henry Scale, 1629), p. 57:

Thrice happy he, whose age is spent vpon his owne,
The same house sees him old, which him a child hath known,
He leanes vpon his staffe in sand where once he crept,
His mem'ry long descents, of one poore cote hath kept,
He through the various strife of fortune neuer past,
Nor as a wand'ring guest would forraine waters taste,
He neuer fear'd the seas in trade, nor sound of warres,
Nor in hoarse courts of law, hath felt litigious iarres,
Vnskilfull in affaires, he knowes no City neare,
So freely he enioyes the sight of heau'n more cleare,
The yeeres by seu'rall corne, not Consuls he computes,
He notes the Spring by flowres, and Autumne by the fruits,
One space put downe the Sunne, and brings againe the rayes.
Thus by a certaine Orbe he measures out the dayes,
Remembring some great Oke from small beginning spred,
He sees the wood grow old, which with himselfe was bred.
Verona next of Townes as farre as India seemes,
And for the ruddy Sea, Benacus he esteemes:
Yet still his armes are firme, his strength vntam'd and greene;
The full third age hath him a lusty Grandsire seene.
Let others trauaile farre, and hidden coasts display,
This man hath more of life, and those haue more of way.

Elijah Fenton (1683-1730), Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany Poems (London: Printed for Bernard Lintott, 1708), pp. 18-20:

Happy the Man who all his Days does pass
In the paternal Cottage of his Race;
Where first his trembling Infant steps he try'd
Which now supports his Age, and once his Youth employ'd.
This was the Cottage his Forefathers knew,
It saw his Birth, shall see his Burial too;
Unequal Fortunes, and Ambition's Fate
Are things Experience never taught him yet.
Him to strange Lands no rambling Humour bore,
Nor breath'd he ever any Air but of his native Shore.
Free from all anxious Interests of Trade,
No storms at Sea have e'er disturb'd his Head:
He never Battel's wild Confusions saw,
Nor heard the worse Confusions of the Law.
A Stranger to the Town, and Town Employs,
Their dark and crowded Streets, their Stink and Noise;
He a more calm and brighter Sky enjoys.
Nor does the Year by change of Consuls know,
The Year his Fruit's returning Seasons show;
Quarters and Months in Nature's Face he sees,
In Flowers the Spring, and Autumn on his Trees.
The whole Day's Shadows in his Homestead drawn,
Point out the hourly Courses of the Sun.
Grown old with him, a Grove adorns his Field,
Whose tender setts his Infancy beheld.
Of distant India, Erythraean Shores,
Benacus Lake, Verona's neighb'ring Tow'rs,
(Alike unseen) from common Fame has heard,
Alike believes them, and with like Regard.
Yet firm and strong, his Grandchildren admire
The Health and Vigour of their brawny Sire.
The spacious Globe let those that will survey,
This good old Man, content at home to stay,
More happy Years shall know, more Leagues and Countries they.

Francis Fawkes (1721–1777), Original Poems and Translations (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1761), pp. 137-138:

Blest who, content with what the country yields,
Lives in his own hereditary fields!
Who can with pleasure his past life behold!
Whose roof paternal saw him young and old:
And as he tells his long adventures o'er,
A stick supports him where he crawl'd before.
Who ne'er was tempted from his farm to fly,
And drink new streams beneath a foreign sky:
No merchant, he, solicitous of gain,
Dreads not the storms that lash the sounding main:
Nor soldier fears the summons to the war,
Nor the hoarse clamours of the noisy bar.
Unskill'd in business, to the world unknown,
He ne'er beheld the next contiguous town;
Yet nobler objects to his views are given,
Fair flowery fields, and star-embellish'd heaven.
He marks no change of consuls, but computes
Alternate seasons by alternate fruits;
Maturing autumns store of apples bring,
And flowerets are the luxury of spring.
His farm that catches first the sun's bright ray,
Sees the last lustre of his beams decay:
The passing hours erected columns show,
And are his landmarks and his dials too.
Yon spreading oak a little twig he knew,
And the whole grove in his remembrance grew.
Verona's walls remote as India seem;
Benacus is th' Arabian Gulph to him.
Yet health three ages lengthens out his span,
And grandsons hail the vigorous old man.
Let others vainly sail from shore to shore,
Their joys are fewer, and their labours more.

Helen Waddell (1889-1965):

This man has lived his life in his own fields.
The house that saw him as a little lad
Sees him an old man: leaning on his staff,
On the same earth he crawled on, he will tell you
The centuries that one low roof has seen.
Fate has not dragged him through the brawling crowds,
Nor ever, as a restless traveller,
Has he drunk at unknown springs; no greed of gain
Kept him a-quaking on the perilous seas.
No trumpet sounded for him the attack,
No lawsuit brought him to the raucous courts.
In politics unskilled, knowing naught of the neighbouring town,
His eye takes pleasure in a wider sky.
The years he'll reckon in alternate crops
And not by parliaments: spring has her flowers,
Autumn her apples: so the year goes by.
The same wide field that hides the setting sun
Sees him return again;
His light the measure of this plain man's day.
That massive oak he remembers a sapling once,
Yon grove of trees grew old along with him.
Verona further seems than India,
Lake Garda is as remote as the Red Sea.
Yet, strength indomitable and sinews firm,
The old man stands, a rock among his grandsons.
Let you go gadding, gape at furthest Spain:
You'll have seen life; but this old man has lived.

Still more translations of this splendid poem (some with the Latin text):

There Was an Old Man of Verona (Abraham Cowley, Maurice Platnauer)
Happy the Man (Thomas Randolph)
In Cities Never Seen (Henry Vaughan)
Fixed in Place (Mildmay Fane)

The People's Praise

2012-01-25T10:22:00.002-06:00

John Milton, Paradise Regained 3.47-56:

For what is glory but the blaze of fame,
The people's praise, if always praise unmixed?
And what the people but a herd confused,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar, and well weighed, scarce worth the praise?
They praise and they admire they know not what;
And know not whom, but as one leads the other;
And what delight to be by such extolled,
To live upon their tongues, and be their talk,
Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise?

Classical Education

2012-01-25T06:08:00.001-06:00

A. B. Goldenveizer, Talks with Tolstoi, tr. S.S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf (Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1923), rpt. in Translations from the Russian by Virginia Woolf and S.S. Koteliansky (Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, 2006), p. 196 (May 11, 1899):

The conversation turned upon ancient languages and classical education. L.N. said:

'When I studied and read a great deal of Greek, I could easily understand almost any Greek book. I used to be at the examinations in the Lyceum, and saw that nearly always the pupil only understood what he had learnt beforehand. He did not understand new passages. And indeed, at school for every fifty words that were learnt at least sixty-five rules were taught. In such a way one can't learn anything.'

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

Related posts:

Education

2012-01-24T13:35:00.004-06:00

Diogenes Laertius 5.19 (tr. R.D. Hicks, on Aristotle):

Being asked how the educated differ from the uneducated, "As much," he said, "as the living from the dead." He used to declare education to be an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity. Teachers who educated children deserved, he said, more honour than parents who merely gave them birth; for bare life is furnished by the one, the other ensures a good life.

ἐρωτηθεὶς τίνι διαφέρουσιν οἱ πεπαιδευμένοι τῶν ἀπαιδεύτων, "ὅσῳ," εἶπεν, "οἱ ζῶντες τῶν τεθνεώτων." τὴν παιδείαν ἔλεγεν ἐν μὲν ταῖς εὐτυχίαις εἶναι κόσμον, ἐν δὲ ταῖς ἀτυχίαις καταφυγήν. τῶν γονέων τοὺς παιδεύσαντας ἐντιμοτέρους εἶναι τῶν μόνον γεννησάντων· τοὺς μὲν γὰρ τὸ ζῆν, τοὺς δὲ τὸ καλῶς ζῆν παρασχέσθαι.

Jan Steen, A School for Boys and Girls

Doryphore

2012-01-24T10:20:00.005-06:00

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines doryphore (also spelled doriphore) as "One who draws attention to the minor errors made by others, esp. in a pestering manner; a pedantic gadfly," and adds "The English sense was introduced by and particularly associated with Sir Harold Nicolson (1886–1968)." One of the OED citations is the following, from Nicholson in The Spectator (October 17, 1952) 500-501:

The doriphore...is the type of questing prig, who derives intense satisfaction from pointing out the errors of others.

When I read a description like this, I say "ouch" to myself, as it hits a little too close to home.

The OED's etymology is "French doryphore Colorado beetle (also used fig.), < Greek δορυϕόρος spear-carrier." The French apparently do use doryphore figuratively, but not in the sense given to it by Nicholson, for which the French might say, e.g., pinailleur, defined by Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé as "(Personne) qui a le souci exagéré du détail. Synon. chicaneur, chicanier, tatillon."

Eric Thomson drew my attention to the following lithograph by Daumier:

The inscription reads:

UN BOUQUINISTE DANS L'IVRESSE. - Rien n'égale ma joie... je viens de trouver à acheter pour cinquante écus un Horace imprimé à Amsterdam en 1780... cette édition est excessivement précieuse, à chaque page elle est criblée de fautes!...

i.e.

A BOOKSELLER IN ECSTACY. - Nothing equals my joy... I just found for sale, at 50 écus, a Horace printed in Amsterdam in 1780... This edition is extremely valuable, on each page it's riddled with errors!...

The pedant in me looked for an edition of Horace printed in Amsterdam in 1780, but didn't find one. If such an edition existed, its interest for me would consist not in its monetary value, but in all those errors just waiting to be discovered and corrected.

Hell

2012-01-23T11:46:00.001-06:00

Everyone knows the definition of Hell in Sartre's No Exit: "L'enfer, c'est les autres" (Hell is other people). Earlier in the same play, another frightening feature of Hell is disclosed:

GARCIN: Il y a des livres, ici?
LE GARÇON: Non.

GARCIN: Are there books here?
VALET: No.

Envy

2012-01-23T11:42:00.002-06:00

Cyprian, On Jealousy and Envy 7-8 (tr. E. Wallis):

[7] But what a gnawing worm of the soul is it, what a plague-spot of our thoughts, what a rust of the heart, to be jealous of another, either in respect of his virtue or of his happiness; that is, to hate in him either his own deservings or the divine benefits—to turn the advantages of others into one's own mischief—to be tormented by the prosperity of illustrious men—to make other people's glory one's own penalty, and, as it were, to apply a sort of executioner to one's own breast, to bring the tormentors to one's own thoughts and feelings, that they may tear us with intestinal pangs, and may smite the secret recesses of the heart with the hoof of malevolence. To such, no food is joyous, no drink can be cheerful. They are ever sighing, and groaning, and grieving; and since envy is never put off by the envious, the possessed heart is rent without intermission day and night. Other ills have their limit; and whatever wrong is done, is bounded by the completion of the crime. In the adulterer the offense ceases when the violation is perpetrated; in the case of the robber, the crime is at rest when the homicide is committed; and the possession of the booty puts an end to the rapacity of the thief; and the completed deception places a limit to the wrong of the cheat. Jealousy has no limit; it is an evil continually enduring, and a sin without end. In proportion as he who is envied has the advantage of a greater success, in that proportion the envious man burns with the fires of jealousy to an increased heat.

[8] Hence the threatening countenance, the lowering aspect, pallor in the face, trembling on the lips, gnashing of the teeth, mad words, unbridled revilings, a hand prompt for the violence of slaughter; even if for the time deprived of a sword, yet armed with the hatred of an infuriate mind.

The Latin:

[7] qualis vero est animae tinea, quae cogitationum tabes, pectoris quanta rubigo zelare in altero vel virtutem eius vel felicitatem, id est odisse in eo vel merita propria vel beneficia divina, in malum proprium bona aliena convertere, inlustrium prosperitate torqueri, aliorum gloriam facere suam poenam, velut quosdam pectori suo admovere carnifices, cogitationibus et sensibus suis adhibere tortores qui se intestinis cruciatibus lacerent, qui cordis secreta malivolentiae ungulis pulsent. non cibus talibus laetus, non potus potest esse iocundus. suspiratur semper et ingemescitur et doletur, dumque ab invidis numquam livor exponitur, diebus ac noctibus pectus obsessum sine intermissione laniatur. mala cetera habent terminum et quodcumque delinquitur delicti consummatione finitur. in adultero cessat facinus perpetrato stupro, in latrone conquiescit scelus homicidio admisso et praedonis rapacitatem statuit possessa praeda et falsario modum ponit impleta fallacia. zelus terminum non habet, permanens iugiter malum et sine fine peccatum, quanto que ille cui invidetur successu meliore profecerit tanto invidus in maius incendium livoris ignibus inardescit.

[8] hinc vultus minax, torvus aspectus, pallor in facie, in labiis tremor, stridor in dentibus, verba rabida, effrenata convicia, manus ad caedis violentiam prompta, etiamsi a gladio interim vacua, odio tamen furiatae mentis armata.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Great Expectations

2012-01-22T10:43:00.002-06:00

Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 191 (Tuesday, October 9, 1711):

We live up to our Expectations, not to our Possessions, and make a Figure proportionable to what we may be, not what we are. We out-run our present Income, as not doubting to disburse our selves out of the Profits of some future Place, Project, or Reversion that we have in view. It is through this Temper of Mind, which is so common among us, that we see Tradesmen break, who have met with no Misfortunes in their Business; and Men of Estates reduced to Poverty, who have never suffered from Losses or Repairs, Tenants, Taxes, or Law-suits. In short, it is this foolish sanguine Temper, this depending upon Contingent Futurities, that occasions Romantick Generosity, Chymerical Grandeur, Senseless Ostentation, and generally ends in Beggary and Ruin. The Man who will live above his present Circumstances, is in great Danger of living in a little time much beneath them, or, as the Italian Proverb runs, The Man who lives by Hope will die by Hunger.

It should be an indispensable Rule in Life, to contract our Desires to our present Condition, and whatever ever may be our Expectations, to live within the Compass of what we actually possess. It will be Time enough to enjoy an Estate when it comes into our Hands; but if we anticipate our good Fortune, we shall lose the Pleasure of it when it arrives, and may possibly never possess what we have so foolishly counted upon.

Odium Philologicum

2012-01-21T09:57:00.002-06:00

Edmund Gosse, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917), pp. 249-250:

We have already noted that relations between the poet and the official representative of Shakespearean criticism were strained as early as the end of 1875. But the breach between Furnivall and Swinburne was not final until January 1880, when the storm at last broke out in full fury. Furnivall now lost all self-command, and wrote of "Mr. Swinburne's shallow ignorance and infinite self-conceit." He told him "to teach his grandmother to suck eggs"; he told him that his ear was "a poetaster's, hairy, thick and dull." Presently Furnivall took to parodying Swinburne's name, with dismal vulgarity, as "Pigsbrook" (to which injury the poet archly retorted by dubbing Furnivall "Brothelsdyke"); and he assailed the poet's private friends with insolent post-cards to the poet's disadvantage. He brought down upon himself the reproof of Halliwell-Phillipps, and of another of the most eminent of his own supporters, Aldis Wright, who told Furnivall that he was behaving "like an angry monkey." A large number of the influential members of the New Shakspere Society expostulated with Furnivall in a signed protest. He struck all the names of these signatories out of the list of members, and sent them a printed letter (April 25, 1881), telling them — they included the seventh Duke of Devonshire, Jebb, and Creighton — "I am glad to be rid of you."

As others have noted, Old English swin ("a swine") and burn ("a bubbling or running water, a BOURN, brook, stream, river") yield "Pigsbrook", Latin fornix ("a brothel, bagnio, stew") and vallum ("an earthen wall or rampart set with palisades, a palisaded rampart, intrenchment, circumvallation") result in "Brothelsdyke". Definitions are from Bosworth and Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary.

I haven't seen Oscar Maurer, "Swinburne vs. Fornivall," University of Texas Studies in English 31 (1952) 86-96.

Related post: Odium and Insults.

Examinations

2012-01-21T08:11:00.002-06:00

John Murray (1879-1964), quoted in Geoffrey Madan's Notebooks: A Selection, edd. J.A. Gere and John Sparrow (1981; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 23:

I believe in examinations because I believe in original sin. Boys and girls are full of it, they are lazy, slapdash, etc., and examinations mean doing the best you can with the means at your disposal, all on your own, and against the clock. Examinations are just like life, the only thing almost, that boys and girls do in school that is really like life.

Related post: Examinations (Walter Raleigh).

Greek Accents

2012-01-20T08:56:00.002-06:00

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1881), Aurora Leigh, book II, lines 74-77:

Some Greek upon the margin: lady's Greek
Without the accents.

George Eliot (1819-1880), Middlemarch, chapter VII:

But Dorothea herself was a little shocked and discouraged at her own stupidity, and the answers she got to some timid questions about the value of the Greek accents gave her a painful suspicion that here indeed there might be secrets not capable of explanation to a woman's reason.

G.M. Young (1882-1959), quoted in Geoffrey Madan's Notebooks: A Selection, edd. J.A. Gere and John Sparrow (1981; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 79:

To accent Greek, as absurd as writing it on papyrus.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson, to whom I'm indebted for the gift of Geoffrey Madan's Notebooks.

Related post: Indictment of the Present Age.

Book Smuggling

2012-01-19T09:04:00.003-06:00

I can't resist posting the following, from an email sent by a friend:

I negotiated successfully the Ryanair gauntlet, which consists of the scrupulous and miserly weighing and measurement of luggage and the imposition of swingeing penalties for infractors. My purchases in London, apart from sweets for the children, were 35 books, a Rowlandson aquatint, and a second-hand shirt, so with only 25 kilos legally permitted (including hand-luggage) a mammoth concealment operation was called for – four breast pockets and four side pockets for the paperbacks and 'everymans', then a couple of the heftier volumes stowed fore and aft down the trousers, and one inside the newspaper. Fortunately, a fair proportion of the British population is clinically obese, so my bulk and slightly waddling gait didn't attract undue attention.

A Plaything

2012-01-19T08:54:00.000-06:00

Thomas Love Peacock, Crochet Castle (1831), chapter IX:

My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is me judice, no book,—it is a plaything.

A Greek Botanical Catalogue

2012-01-19T08:27:00.004-06:00

Eupolis, fragment 13 (from Nanny-Goats, preserved in Plutarch, Moralia 662d, tr. Ian C. Storey):

We feed off every sort of tree: fir tree, prickly oak, and strawberry tree, munching on their tender shoots and also the foliage: the medick tree and fragrant sage, and leafy bindweed, wild olive, lentisk, ash tree, poplar, holm oak, oak tree, ivy, heather, willow, thornbush, mullein, asphodel, rockrose, deciduous oak, thyme, and savory.

The same, translated by T.R. Glover, "The Greeks and the Forest," The Challenge of the Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), pp. 29-50 (at 46):

Every kind of tree must render
Tribute in its shoots so tender;
Oak and fir and arbutus
All are eatable for us;
Spurge, laburnum, fragrant sage
Must our goatish greed assuage;
Smilax, olive, mastich, ash—
All their hopes of growth we dash;
Sea-oak, ivy, heather, pine,
Buckthorn, mullein, asphodel,
Rock-rose, ilex—but why tell
One by one, when twig and prickle,
Leaf and flower, our throats must tickle.

The Greek:

βοσκόμεθ' ὕλης ἀπὸ παντοδαπῆς, ἐλάτης, πρίνου κομάρου τε
πτόρθους ἁπαλοὺς ἀποτρώγουσαι, καὶ πρὸς τούτοισί ἔτ' ἄνθην,
κύτισόν τ' ἠδὲ σφάκον εὐώδη, καὶ σμίλακα τὴν πολύφυλλον,
κότινον, σχῖνον, μελίαν, λεύκην, ἁρίαν, δρῦν, κιττόν, ἐρίκην,
πρόμαλον, ῥάμνον, φλόμον, ἀνθέρικον, φηγόν, κισθόν, θύμα, θύμβραν.

As others have noted, this is a good list of typical species in the Mediterranean maquis.

Related posts:

A Poem by William Morris
Oak, and Ash, and Thorn (Rudyard Kipling)
A Catalogue of Trees in Ovid
A Catalogue of Trees (Edmund Spenser)

Holy Hurrahs

2012-01-18T15:18:00.000-06:00

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals (April 26, 1838):

As far as I notice what passes in philanthropic meetings and holy hurrahs there is very little depth of interest. The speakers warm each other's skin and lubricate each other's tongue, and the words flow and the superlatives thicken and the lips quiver and the eyes moisten, and an observer new to such scenes would say, Here was true fire; the assembly were all ready to be martyred, and the effect of such a spirit on the community would be irresistible; but they separate and go to the shop, to a dance, to bed, and an hour afterwards they care so little for the matter that on slightest temptation each one would disclaim the meeting. "Yes, he went, but they were for carrying it too far," etc., etc.

The lesson is, to know that men are superficially very inflammable, but that these fervors do not strike down and reach the action and habit of the man.

The New Loeb Plautus, Volume I

2012-01-18T10:48:00.009-06:00

I just finished reading Plautus, Amphitryon. The Comedy of Asses. The Pot of Gold. The Two Bacchises. The Captives. Edited and Translated by Wolfgang de Melo (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), the first volume in the Loeb Classical Library's replacement of Paul Nixon's edition. The new text, translation, introductions, and notes are all excellent, but I did note a few misprints, errors, and inconsistencies.

Misprints in the translation:

Asinaria 216 (p. 165): for "When a fowler prepares a clearing, hejup spreads food there" read "When a fowler prepares a clearing, he spreads food there".

Asinaria 893 (p. 239): for "Yes, much sweater breath than that of my wife" read "Yes, much sweeter breath than that of my wife".

Bacchides 588 (p. 427): for "BACCHIS" read "Bacchis".

Captivi 513-515 (p. 559): "Now follow me (514-15) so you get what you asked for and meet the man" — elsewhere line numbers appear in the margin, not in parentheses, and so "514-15" should appear in the right-hand margin here.

Usually de Melo does not translate edepol, ecastor, hercle and similar words, apparently a matter of choice.

Errors or infelicities in the critical apparatus:

Amphitruo 418 (p. 50): for "418 est datum P, transp. Lindsay" read "418 datum est P, transp. Lindsay".

Amphitruo 726 (p. 82): "726 misero del. Pylades" should perhaps appear on p. 84, where the corresponding text for the end of line 726 is printed. Similarly some of the apparatus for the end of Aulularia 660 should perhaps appear on p. 330, not p. 329, to avoid turning the page.

Asinaria 552 (p. 200): for "552 uersum sed. Bothe" read "552 uersum secl. Bothe" (cf. e.g. critical apparatus for Aulularia 515 on p. 312: "515 uersum secl. Francken").

Finally, a trivial matter. Some editors mark only insertions and deletions of entire words (not of syllables and letters) in a text. But in de Melo's text, there are inconsistencies in how insertions and deletions of syllables and letters are indicated. For example, at Amphitruo 151 (p. 24), de Melo prints "<in>spectantibus", adopting his own supplement for the transmitted text ("spectantibus"). Yet at Amphitruo 998 (p. 112), de Melo prints "inspectantibus" (adopting Pylades' insertion of "in") — here, to be consistent, "<in>spectantibus" should also appear in the text. I see insertion and deletion of letters or syllables marked elsewhere, e.g. at Amphitruo 985 "au<i>dax" (p. 110, Skutsch's insertion), at Captivi 704 "uot[a]uisti" (p. 578, Pareus' deletion), at Captivi 856 "<tu>te" (p. 594, Bentley's insertion), etc. If one were to be consistent in this matter, the following insertions and deletions of syllables and letters would also be marked in the Latin text:

Amphitruo 797 (p. 92): ha<n>c (Spengel's insertion)

Asinaria 348 (p. 178): se[se] (Acidalius' deletion)

Aulularia 120 (p. 270): me<d> (Guyet's insertion)

Aulularia 125 (p. 270): <n>ullam (Lindsay's insertion)

Aulularia 390 (p. 300): potes<t> (Heckmann's insertion)

Aulularia 466 (p. 308): anu[i] (Stockert's deletion)

Aulularia 671 (p. 330): illi<c> (Bothe's insertion)

Bacchides 487 (p. 414): opino[r] (Lindsay's deletion)

Bacchides 592 (p. 426): negat[o] (Acidalius' deletion)

Bacchides 893 (p. 460): Lato[na] (Ussing's deletion)

Captivi 94 (p. 516): illi[c] (Lindsay's deletion)

Captivi 665 (p. 576): seruo<lu>m (Bothe's insertion)

Captivi 1022 (p. 614): <re>cogito (Gruterus' insertion)

Thanks to Charles Collicutt for correcting a typographical error of my own in this post!

Bawlers

2012-01-17T08:02:00.001-06:00

Richard Steele, The Spectator, no. 148 (Monday, August 20, 1711):

There are another Kind of Impertinents which a Man is perplexed with in mixed Company, and those are your loud Speakers: These treat Mankind as if we were all deaf; they do not express but declare themselves. Many of these are guilty of this Outrage out of Vanity, because they think all they say is well; or that they have their own Persons in such Veneration, that they believe nothing which concerns them can be insignificant to any Body else. For these People's sake, I have often lamented that we cannot close our Ears with as much ease as we can our Eyes: It is very uneasy that we must necessarily be under Persecution.

Ode to Indolence

2012-01-17T08:00:00.001-06:00

William Shenstone (1714-1763), Ode to Indolence:

Ah! why for ever on the wing
Persists my wearied soul to roam?
Why, ever cheated, strives to bring
Or pleasure or contentment home?

Thus the poor bird, that draws his name
From Paradise's honour'd groves,
Careless fatigues his little frame,
Nor finds the resting-place he loves.

Lo! on the rural mossy bed
My limbs with careless ease reclined;
Ah, gentle Sloth! indulgent spread
The same soft bandage o'er my mind.

For why should lingering thought invade,
Yet every worldly prospect cloy?
Lend me, soft Sloth! thy friendly aid,
And give me peace, debarr'd of joy.

Lov'st thou yon calm and silent flood,
That never ebbs, that never flows;
Protected by the circling wood
From each tempestuous wind that blows?

An altar on its bank shall rise,
Where oft thy votary shall be found;
What time pale Autumn lulls the skies,
And sickening verdure fades around.

Ye busy Race! ye factious Train!
That haunt ambition's guilty shrine;
No more perplex the world in vain,
But offer here your vows with mine.

And thou, puissant Queen! be kind:
If e'er I shared thy balmy power,
If e'er I sway'd my active mind
To weave for thee the rural bower;

Dissolve in sleep each anxious care;
Each unavailing sigh remove;
And only let me wake to share
The sweets of friendship and of love.

No Aesthetics, Please

2012-01-16T10:19:00.004-06:00

Edward FitzGerald, letter to W.A. Wright (July 1878):

Ask some one—and tell me—some good Schoolboy Edition of Virgil—English notes and no Aesthetics.

Cf. FitzGerald's letter to Wright (February 23, 1880, on Wright's editions of Shakespeare):

I saw some stuff in the Academy about the want of Aesthetics in the Clarendon Press notes: a pretty mess the Aesthetics make of it: and I hope you will stick to the Incontrovertible.

and his letter to Fanny Kemble (March 1, 1880):

This Wright edits certain Shakespeare Plays for Macmillan: very well, I fancy, so far as Notes go; simply explaining what needs explanation for young Readers, and eschewing all aesthetic (now, don't say you don't know what "aesthetic" means, etc.) aesthetic (detestable word) observation. With this the Swinburnes, Furnivalls, Athenaeums, etc., find fault: and a pretty hand they make of it when they try that tack. It is safest surely to give people all the Data you can for forming a Judgment, and then leave them to form it by themselves.

Fixed in Place

2012-01-16T09:50:00.003-06:00

Mildmay Fane (1602-1666), Of an Old Man (a translation of Claudian, Carmina Minora 20, better known as The Old Man of Verona, from Fane's Otia Sacra):

Happy is He who on his own fields stage,
And no where else, hath acted ore his Age;
He, whom his own house, (had it eyes and tongue)
Might say it sees Him old, and saw him young.
Now trusting to a staff, he treads those sands
He formerly had crept on with his hands:
So reckons up the long descent and (dotage
Through decays) of that his homely Cottage.
He ne'r was drawn with fortunes Train to haste,
Nor did He flatter Forain springs with taste;
He was no Merchant-man might fear the Straits,
Nor Souldier fancying Military baits;
He never Pleaded, neither strife nor force,
Of brabling Law-suits ever made him hoarse:
But (as uncapable of business) free
Cannot resolve what the next town should be,
Yet doth enjoy a prospect (may controule
All others) of the free Aire, and Pole.
Nor casts He up the year by Consuls now,
But as the Fruit-trees to their seasons bow;
By Apples Autumn, Spring by Flowers befalls him.
One field hides Phoebus-face, the same recalls him:
And thus This Countrey-swains observing way
Measures within his Orb the Course of Day.
He did remember yon great Oak, when 't stood
But for a sapling, so's grown old with's wood:
And judging that same Ile (with less wits blest
More Barbarism) to be th' Indies East:
He doth conclude the Red-sea to be neer,
Beholding Stranground, Farcet, and the Meer:
And yet through strength unconquer'd he may gather
Comfort, the third Age sees him Grandfather.
Let others wander to the farth'st of Spain,
The way is onely Theirs, but life His gain.

The old man of Verona may never have wandered far from his "homely Cottage," but in this translation Fane places him in what is now Cambridgeshire (Stranground, i.e. Stanground, and Farcet).

I haven't read "Claudian's Old Man of Verona: An Anthology of English Translations with a New Poem by Edwin Morgan," Translation and Literature 2 (1993) 87-97, but for some other translations and the original Latin see:

There Was an Old Man of Verona (Abraham Cowley, Maurice Platnauer)
Happy the Man (Thomas Randolph)
In Cities Never Seen (Henry Vaughan)

Lupus Est Homo Homini

2012-01-15T09:08:00.000-06:00

Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 169 (Tuesday, September 13, 1711):

Man is subject to innumerable Pains and Sorrows by the very Condition of Humanity, and yet, as if Nature had not sown Evils enough in Life, we are continually adding Grief to Grief, and aggravating the common Calamity by our cruel Treatment of one another. Every Man's natural Weight of Afflictions is still made more heavy by the Envy, Malice, Treachery, or Injustice of his Neighbour. At the same time that the Storm beats upon the whole Species, we are falling foul upon one another.

Flip-Flopper

2012-01-15T09:07:00.001-06:00

Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 162 (Tuesday, September 5, 1711):

Nothing that is not a real Crime makes a Man appear so contemptible and little in the Eyes of the World as Inconstancy, especially when it regards Religion or Party. In either of these Cases, tho' a Man perhaps does but his Duty in changing his Side, he not only makes himself hated by those he left, but is seldom heartily esteemed by those he comes over to.

In these great Articles of Life, therefore, a Man's Conviction ought to be very strong, and if possible so well timed that worldly Advantages may seem to have no Share in it, or Mankind will be ill natured enough to think he does not change Sides out of Principle, but either out of Levity of Temper or Prospects of Interest.

Best Never To Be Born: Supplement

2012-01-15T09:05:00.001-06:00

The Rubā'īyāt of Omar Khayyām, edited from a newly discovered manuscript ... by A.J. Arberry (London: Emery Walker Limited, 1949), p. 87:

The heavens, that increase naught but grief, set not one thing down until they snatch away another: if they that have not (yet) come knew what we suffer at the hands of fate, they would not come at all.

My Good Woman!

2012-01-14T10:11:00.004-06:00

Virginia Woolf, "Miss Janet Case: Classical Scholar and Teacher," The Times (July 22, 1937), rpt. in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. VI, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: The Hogarth Press, 2011), pp. 111-112 (footnotes omitted):

When she left Cambridge she settled in London and for many years earned her living by teaching, in schools and private houses, a great variety of pupils, some seriously to pass examinations, others less seriously to read Greek for their own amusement.

Undoubtedly if the pupil were in earnest Janet Case was a highly competent tutor. She was no dilettante; she could edit a Greek play and win praise from the great Verrall himself. But if the pupil were destined to remain an amateur, Janet Case accepted the fact without concealing the drawbacks and made the best of it. The grammar was shut and the play opened. Somehow the masterpieces of Greek drama were stormed, without grammar, without accents, but somehow, under her compulsion, so sane and yet so stimulating, out they shone, if inaccessible still supremely desirable.

....

In a pencilled note written a few days before her death she recalled how Lady D. 'used to come to her lesson like a nymph scarcely dry from her bath in a gauze wrap...and used to say "My good woman" in an expostulatory tone when I objected to an adjective not agreeing with its noun or some such trifle.'

The editor (p. 113, n. 6) identifies Lady D. as Lady Diana Cooper (1892-1986).

See Henry M. Alley, "A Rediscovered Eulogy: Virginia Woolf's 'Miss Janet Case: Classical Scholar and Teacher'," Twentieth Century Literature 28.3 (Autumn 1982) 290-301, and Kate Perry, "Case, Janet Elizabeth (1863–1937)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

The Duty of Cheerfulness

2012-01-14T08:56:00.002-06:00

Richard Steele, The Spectator, no. 100 (Monday, June 25, 1711):

A man advanced in Years that thinks fit to look back upon his former Life, and calls that only Life which was passed with Satisfaction and Enjoyment, excluding all Parts which were not pleasant to him, will find himself very young, if not in his Infancy. Sickness, Ill-humour, and Idleness, will have robbed him of a great Share of that Space we ordinarily call our Life. It is therefore the Duty of every Man that would be true to himself, to obtain, if possible, a Disposition to be pleased, and place himself in a constant Aptitude for the Satisfactions of his Being.

....

It is a wonderful thing that so many, and they not reckoned absurd, shall entertain those with whom they converse by giving them the History of their Pains and Aches; and imagine such Narrations their Quota of the Conversation. This is of all other the meanest Help to Discourse, and a Man must not think at all, or think himself very insignificant, when he finds an Account of his Head-ach answer'd by another's asking what News in the last Mail? Mutual good Humour is a Dress we ought to appear in whenever we meet, and we should make no mention of what concerns our selves, without it be of Matters wherein our Friends ought to rejoyce...

Similarly Steele in The Spectator, no. 143 (Tuesday, August 14, 1711):

That Part of Life which we ordinarily understand by the Word Conversation, is an Indulgence to the Sociable Part of our Make; and should incline us to bring our Proportion of good Will or good Humour among the Friends we meet with, and not to trouble them with Relations which must of necessity oblige them to a real or feign'd Affliction. Cares, Distresses, Diseases, Uneasinesses, and Dislikes of our own, are by no means to be obtruded upon our Friends.

....

Whatever we do we should keep up the Chearfulness of our Spirits, and never let them sink below an Inclination at least to be well-pleased: The Way to this, is to keep our Bodies in Exercise, our Minds at Ease.

Back to Books

2012-01-13T10:09:00.002-06:00

Ralph Waldo Emerson, May-Day, lines 35-57:

When late I walked, in earlier days,
All was stiff and stark;
Knee-deep snows choked all the ways,
In the sky no spark;
Firm-braced I sought my ancient woods,
Struggling through the drifted roads;
The whited desert knew me not,
Snow-ridges masked each darling spot;
The summer dells, by genius haunted,
One arctic moon had disenchanted.
All the sweet secrets therein hid
By Fancy, ghastly spells undid.
Eldest mason, Frost, had piled,
With wicked ingenuity,
Swift cathedrals in the wild;
The piny hosts were sheeted ghosts
In the star-lit minster aisled.
I found no joy: the icy wind
Might rule the forest to his mind.
Who would freeze in frozen brakes?
Back to books and sheltered home,
And wood-fire flickering on the walls,
To hear, when, 'mid our talk and games,
Without the baffled north-wind calls.

Willard Leroy Metcalf, Hush of Winter

Better Be Merry

2012-01-13T09:50:00.003-06:00

From Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, tr. Edward Fitzgerald:

XXXVII.

Ah, fill the Cup:—what boots it to repeat
How Time is slipping underneath our Feet:
    Unborn TO-MORROW, and dead YESTERDAY,
Why fret about them if TO-DAY be sweet!

XXXVIII.

One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste—
    The Stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing—Oh, make haste!

XXXIX.

How long, how long, in infinite Pursuit
Of This and That endeavour and dispute?
    Better be merry with the fruitful Grape
Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.

Pioneers

2012-01-12T09:29:00.003-06:00

Albert Henrichs, "Mani and the Babylonian Baptists: A Historical Confrontation," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 77 (1973) 23-59 (at 59):

Written records are the raw material of past history, especially for the modern historian who would be at a loss without them. But in the field of ancient religious beliefs and movements, perhaps more than anywhere else, the very lack of sufficient documentation tends to call forth a rather disproportionate amount of scholarly activity, doubtless nourished by the tacit conviction that when we deal with Geistesgeschichte, certain invariable features of the human condition entitle us to substitute assumptions for recorded facts. What usually comes up in the rear of such forced advances into unknown territory is a large array of conflicting theories, from which scholars choose or to which they add, according to their likes and dislikes. Unmapped areas in the history of the human mind thus become the training ground for our imagination, and rightly so, as long as there are neither reliable roads nor signs to follow. With every piece of new evidence, however, an increasing sense of direction develops. Thus many a long vagary has come to an unexpected end after the discovery of major documents which opened new vistas. But it would be impossible to think of any written text which has come down to us, however well preserved and rich in information, that has solved all our problems. The triumphant feeling which great finds inspire, more often than not, gives way to a more disenchanted attitude when we come to realize that ignorance is the toll of historical truth and that behind each foothold in newly gained terrain, looms an abyss of nowhere. After we have pitched our camp in the new location, we are once more left with conjecture and imagination as our only guides.

The One Percent

2012-01-12T09:21:00.001-06:00

Thomas More (1478-1535), Utopia 2.9 (tr. Ralph Robinson):

And yet besides this the rich men not only by private fraud, but also by common laws, do every day pluck and snatch away from the poor some part of their daily living....Therefore, when I consider and weigh in my mind all these commonwealths which nowadays anywhere do flourish, so God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely without fear of losing that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be.

Quid quod ex diurno pauperum demenso divites cotidie aliquid, non modo privata fraude sed publicis etiam legibus abradunt....Itaque omnes has quae hodie usquam florent Respublicas animo intuenti ac versanti mihi, nihil, sic me amet deus, occurrit aliud quam quaedam conspiratio divitum, de suis commodis Reipublicae nomine tituloque tractantium. Comminiscunturque et excogitant omnes modos atque artes quibus, quae malis artibus ipsi congresserunt, ea primum ut absque perdendi metu retineant, post hoc ut pauperum omnium opera ac laboribus quam minimo sibi redimant, eisque abutantur.

Hat tip: Jim K.

Freedom

2012-01-12T09:16:00.002-06:00

William Shenstone (1714-1763), Written at an Inn at Henley:

To thee, fair freedom! I retire
    From flattery, cards, and dice, and din;
Nor art thou found in mansions higher
    Than the low cot, or humble inn.

'Tis here with boundless power I reign;
    And every health which I begin,
Converts dull port to bright champagne;
    Such freedom crowns it, at an inn.

I fly from pomp, I fly from plate!
    I fly from falsehood's specious grin!
Freedom I love, and form I hate,
    And chuse my lodgings at an inn.

Here, waiter! take my sordid ore,
    Which lacqueys else might hope to win;
It buys, what courts have not in store;
    It buys me freedom at an inn.

Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round,
    Where'er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
    The warmest welcome, at an inn.

Asyndetic, Privative Adjectives in Fragments of Old Comedy

2012-01-11T10:21:00.003-06:00

While reading Fragments of Old Comedy, edited and translated by Ian C. Storey, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), I noticed some examples of asyndetic, privative adjectives.

Nicochares, fragment 21 (vol. II, pp. 392-393):

ἀλλ' εἰλήμμεθα / λαβὴν ἄφυκτον, ἀδιάγλυπτον

But we are caught in an unbreakable hold, inescapable.

Phrynicus, fragment 20 (vol. III, pp. 58-59):

τηλικουτοσὶ γέρων / ἄπαις ἀγύναικος

An old man of my generation, childless, wifeless.

Phrynicus, fragment 57 (vol. III, pp. 72-73):

ἄσιτος, ἄποτος, ἀναπόνιπτος

Without food, without drink, with hands unwashed.

Theopompus, fragment 72 (vol. III, pp. 350-351):

ἄπνους, ἄνευρος, ἀσθενής, ἀνέντατος

Without breath, without nerve, without strength, without exertion.

In volume II of this Loeb Classical Library edition, the passage at the top of p. 289 (continued from the bottom of p. 287) should be printed in italics.

Porson and the Devil

2012-01-11T10:18:00.002-06:00

Yesterday, Porson or the Devil. Today, Porson and the Devil, from E.H. Barker, Literary Anecdotes and Contemporary Reminiscences, of Professor Porson and Others (London: J.R. Smith, 1852), vol. II, p. 22:

Porson used to go to the Cyder-cellar: he said that a stranger, whom he met there, used to discourse most learnedly about the οἶνος κρίθινος, or whiskey of the ancients, as this stranger asserted it to be; he surprised Porson with the accuracy, variety, and extent of his information. He was never found out, notwithstanding all Porson’s enquiries. A fortnight afterwards Porson was asked about the existence of the Devil: "Sir," said he, "I doubted his existence till I saw him seated in that chair a fortnight ago."

Thanks to Andrew Rickard for introducing me to Barker's book, where I also find (vol. II, p. 23) this:

The following anecdote is from Mr. Cogan. Poison called on a friend, who was reading Thucydides, and wished to consult him on the meaning of a word. Porson, hearing the word, repeated the passage. His friend asked how he knew it was that passage. "Because," said P., "the word occurs only twice in Thucydides, once on the right hand, and once on the left. I observed on which side you looked, and therefore knew the passage to which you referred."

Nothing Grander

2012-01-10T07:11:00.003-06:00

Menander, fragment 373 (from Ὑποβολιμαῖος), lines 1-7, tr. F.H. Sandbach:

I count that man happiest of all, Parmenon, who has gazed untroubled upon these majestic sights, the sun in whom we all have our share, the stars, rain, clouds and lightning, and who then has quickly left for the place whence he came. Even if you live for a hundred years, it is these sights that will always be there for you to see, just as much as if you lived for only a very few years. You will never see anything grander than these.

τοῦτον εὐτυχέστατον λέγω,
ὅστις θεωρήσας ἀλύπως, Παρμένων,
τὰ σεμνὰ ταῦτ᾽ ἀπῆλθεν, ὅθεν ἦλθεν, ταχύ·
τὸν ἥλιον τὸν κοινόν, ἄστρ᾽, ὕδωρ, νέφη,
πῦρ. ταῦτα, κἂν ἑκατὸν ἔτη βιῷς, ἀεὶ
ὄψει παρόντα, κἂν ἐνιαυτοὺς σφόδρ᾿ ὀλίγους·
σεμνότερα τούτων ἕτερα δ᾿ οὐκ ὄψει ποτέ.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Porson or the Devil

2012-01-10T07:06:00.003-06:00

[Richard Gooch], Facetiae Cantabrigienses (London: William Cole, 1825), pp. 133-134:

Porson was once travelling in a stage-coach, when a young Oxonian, fresh from college, was amusing the ladies with a variety of small talk, to which he added a quotation, as he said, from Sophocles. A Greek quotation, and in a stage-coach too, roused our professor, who, in a dog-sleep, was slumbering in one corner of the vehicle. Rubbing his eyes, "I think, young gentleman," said Porson, "you just now favoured us with a quotation from Sophocles; I don't happen to recollect it there." "Oh? Sir," replied the Oxonian, "the quotation is word for word as I repeated it, and in Sophocles too; but I suspect, Sir, it is some time since you were at college." Porson, applying his hand to his great coat, took out a small pocket edition of Sophocles, and handed it to our tyro, saying he should be much obliged if he would show him the passage in that little book. Having rummaged the pages for some time, "Upon second thoughts," said the Oxonian, "I now recollect 'tis in Euripides."—"Then," said the professor, putting his hand into his pocket, and handing him a similar edition of that author, "perhaps you will be so good as to find it for me in that little book."—He returned again to his task, but with no better success, muttering to himself—"Curse me if ever I quote Greek again in a coach." The ladies tittered: at last, "Bless me, Sir," said he, "how dull I am! I recollect now,—yes, yes, I perfectly remember, the passage is in Aeschylus." This inexorable professor applied again to his inexhaustable pocket, and was in the act of handing an Aeschylus to the astonished freshman, when he vociferated—"Stop the coach,—hollo,—coachman let me out, I say,—instantly let me out; there's a fellow here has got the whole Bodleian Library in his pocket; let me out, I say—let me out, he must be Porson or the Devil!"

A Huge Delight

2012-01-09T10:07:00.007-06:00

Robert Browning (1812-1889), Development:

My Father was a scholar and knew Greek.
When I was five years old, I asked him once
'What do you read about?' 'The siege of Troy.'
'What is a siege, and what is Troy?' Whereat
He piled up chairs and tables for a town,
Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat
—Helen, enticed away from home (he said)
By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close
Under the footstool, being cowardly,
But whom—since she was worth the pains, poor puss—
Towzer and Tray,—our dogs, the Atreidai,—sought
By taking Troy to get possession of
—Always when great Achilles ceased to sulk,
(My pony in the stable)—forth would prance
And put to flight Hector—our page-boy’s self.
This taught me who was who and what was what:
So far I rightly understood the case
At five years old; a huge delight it proved
And still proves—thanks to that instructor sage
My Father, who knew better than turn straight
Learning's full flare on weak-eyed ignorance,
Or, worse yet, leave weak eyes to grow sand-blind,
Content with darkness and vacuity.

It happened, two or three years afterward
That—I and playmates playing at Troy's Siege—
My Father came upon our make-believe.
'How would you like to read yourself the tale
Properly told, of which I gave you first
Merely such notion as a boy could bear?
Pope, now, would give you the precise account
Of what, some day, by dint of scholarship
You'll hear—who knows?—from Homer's very mouth.
Learn Greek by all means, read the “Blind Old Man,
Sweetest of Singers"—tuphlos which means "blind,"
Hedistos which means "sweetest," Time enough!
Try, anyhow, to master him some day;
Until when, take what serves for substitute,
Read Pope, by all means!' So I ran through Pope,
Enjoyed the tale—what history so true?
Also attacked my Primer, duly drudged,
Grew fitter thus for what was promised next—
The very thing itself, the actual words,
When I could turn—say, Buttmann to account.

Time passed, I ripened somewhat: one fine day,
'Quite ready for the Iliad, nothing less?
There's Heine, where the big books block the shelf:
Don't skip a word, thumb well the Lexicon!'

I thumbed well and skipped nowise till I learned
Who was who, what was what, from Homer's tongue,
And there an end of learning. Had you asked
The all-accomplished scholar, twelve years old,
'Who was it wrote the Iliad?'—what a laugh!
'Why, Homer, all the world knows: of his life
Doubtless some facts exist: it's everywhere:
We have not settled, though, his place of birth:
He begged, for certain, and was blind beside:
Seven cities claimed him—Scio, with best right,
Thinks Byron. What he wrote? Those Hymns we have.
Then there’s the "Battle of the Frogs and Mice,"
That's all—unless they dig "Margites" up
(I’d like that) nothing more remains to know.'

Thus did youth spend a comfortable time;
Until—'What’s this the Germans say in fact
That Wolf found out first? It's unpleasant work
Their chop and change, unsettling one’s belief:
All the same, where we live, we learn, that's sure.'
So, I bent brow o’er Prolegomena.
And after Wolf, a dozen of his like
Proved there was never any Troy at all,
Neither Besiegers nor Besieged—nay, worse,—
No actual Homer, no authentic text,
No warrant for the fiction I, as fact,
Had treasured in my heart and soul so long—
Ay, mark you! and as fact held still, still hold,
Spite of new knowledge, in my heart of hearts
And soul of souls, fact's essence freed and fixed
From accidental fancy's guardian sheath.
Assuredly thenceforward—thank my stars!—
However it got there, deprive who could—
Wring from the shrine my precious tenantry,
Helen, Ulysses, Hector and his Spouse,
Achilles and his Friend?—though Wolf—ah, Wolf!
Why must he needs come doubting, spoil a dream?

But then, 'No dream's worth waking'—Browning says:
And here's the reason why I tell thus much.
I, now mature man, you anticipate,
May blame my Father justifiably
For letting me dream out my nonage thus,
And only by such slow and sure degrees
Permitting me to sift the grain from chaff,
Get truth and falsehood known and named as such.
Why did he ever let me dream at all,
Not bid me taste the story in its strength?
Suppose my childhood was scarce qualified
To rightly understand mythology,
Silence at least was in his power to keep:
I might have—somehow—correspondingly—
Well, who knows by what method, gained my gains,
Been taught, by forthrights not meanderings,
My aim should be to loathe, like Peleus' son,
A lie as Hell's Gate, love my wedded wife,
Like Hector, and so on with all the rest.
Could not I have excogitated this
Without believing such man really were?
That is—he might have put into my hand
The 'Ethics'? In translation, if you please,
Exact, no pretty lying that improves,
To suit the modern taste: no more, no less—
The 'Ethics': 'tis a treatise I find hard
To read aright now that my hair is gray,
And I can manage the original.
At five years old—How ill had fared its leaves!
Now, growing double o'er the Stagirite,
At least I soil no page with bread and milk,
Nor crumple, dogs-ear and deface—boys' way.

I won't spoil the poem with "fool notes," but Heine is better known as Heyne to classical scholars.

Life in a Box

2012-01-08T08:11:00.003-06:00

Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 349:

Man is not adapted to live in a mirror-lined box generating his own electric light and sending for selected images from outside when he happens to need them. Darkness and a bad smell are all that can come of that. We need the vast world, and it must be a world that does not need us; a world constantly capable of surprising us, a world we did not program, since only such a world is the proper object of wonder.

The Case of the Missing Dictionary

2012-01-08T07:21:00.003-06:00

T.R. Glover, Cambridge Retrospect (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1943), pp. 85-86 (on John E.B. Mayor):

'Impudent fellows,' he called Lewis and Short; 'when they say a word is rare, I write not in the margin; why, they dare to say that adjutorium is rare; from Theodore Priscian alone I have gleaned 740 instances.'

....

At one stage a terrible misfortune befel him. The copy of Lewis and Short, in which he was registering his reading and his corrections of their 'impudence', disappeared, and could not be found. It seemed only too likely that it had been stolen—what a thesaurus of learning it would afford to a rival scholar, who might wish to supersede Lewis and Short—a German, perhaps. That Mayor would concentrate long enough to supersede them himself with a work of his own, nobody who knew him would have believed; but making notes toward a project was another thing, an enjoyable task that gave the sensation of valuable work. But the book was gone—stolen! Mayor notified the learned journals and all who read them, scholars and booksellers, that if they were offered this lost dictionary, they must know it was stolen from him. But it was not stolen, nor indeed very far away. His bedmaker, innocent soul, had used it—not to produce a rival lexicon, but to support a chest of drawers which had lost a foot. Notumque fovens quid femina possit.

Hat tip: Alan Crease.

Man Is But Man

2012-01-07T07:47:00.001-06:00

George Crabbe (1754-1832), Tales of the Hall XXII.98-99:

Man is but man; the thing he most desires
Pleases awhile—then pleases not—then tires.

Prayer for Clean Air?

2012-01-07T07:32:00.005-06:00

Philyllius, fragment 19 Kassel and Austin, tr. Ian C. Storey in Fragments of Old Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), vol. III, p. 35:

I pray that I may draw a lifesaving breath. This is the most important element of health, to breathe clean and unpolluted air.

ἕλκειν τὸ βέδυ σωτήριον προσεύχομαι,
ὅπερ μέγιστόν ἐστιν ὑγιείας μέρος,
τὸ τὸν ἀέρ' ἕλκειν καθαρόν, οὐ τεθολωμένον.

βέδυ is a rare word, occurring in Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 5.46-48 (tr. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson):

...it is said that the Phrygians call water Bedu, as also Orpheus says:—
"And bright water is poured down, the Bedu of the nymphs."
Dion Thytes also seems to write similarly:—
"And taking Bedu, pour it on your hands, and turn to divination."
On the other hand, the comic poet, Philydeus [sic, corrected by Casaubon to Philyllius], understands by Bedu the air, as being (Biodoros) life-giver, in the following lines:—
"I pray that I may inhale the salutary Bedu,
Which is the most essential part of health;
Inhale the pure, the unsullied air."
In the same opinion also concurs Neanthes of Cyzicum, who writes that the Macedonian priests invoke Bedu, which they interpret to mean the air, to be propitious to them and to their children.

....

And Apollodorus of Corcyra says that these lines were recited by Branchus the seer, when purifying the Milesians from plague; for he, sprinkling the multitude with branches of laurel, led off the hymn somehow as follows:—
"Sing Boys Hecaergus and Hecaerga."
And the people accompanied him, saying, "Bedu, Zaps, Chthon, Plectron, Sphinx, Cnaxzbi, Chthyptes, Phlegmos, Drops."

See D. Detschew, "Béδu als makedonischer Gott," Glotta 16 (1928) 280-285, who (at 283) conjectured τὸ ναερὸν (a supposedly uncontracted form of the adjective ναρός = flowing) for τὸ τὸν ἀέρ'.

Vanity Fair

2012-01-06T06:15:00.003-06:00

Excerpts from William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848).

Chapter II:

Nay, with some persons those awes and terrors of youth last for ever and ever. I know, for instance, an old gentleman of sixty-eight, who said to me one morning at breakfast, with a very agitated countenance, "I dreamed last night that I was flogged by Dr. Raine." Fancy had carried him back five-and-fifty years in the course of that evening. Dr. Raine and his rod were just as awful to him in his heart, then, at sixty-eight, as they had been at thirteen. If the Doctor, with a large birch, had appeared bodily to him, even at the age of threescore and eight, and had said in awful voice, "Boy, take down your pant—"?

Id.:

The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.

Chapter III:

What causes young people to "come out," but the noble ambition of matrimony? What sends them trooping to watering-places? What keeps them dancing till five o’clock in the morning through a whole mortal season? What causes them to labour at pianoforte sonatas, and to learn four songs from a fashionable master at a guinea a lesson, and to play the harp if they have handsome arms and neat elbows, and to wear Lincoln Green toxophilite hats and feathers, but that they may bring down some "desirable" young man with those killing bows and arrows of theirs? What causes respectable parents to take up their carpets, set their houses topsy-turvy, and spend a fifth of their year’s income in ball suppers and iced champagne? Is it sheer love of their species, and an unadulterated wish to see young people happy and dancing? Psha! they want to marry their daughters...

Id.:

We have talked of Joseph Sedley being as vain as a girl. Heaven help us! the girls have only to turn the tables, and say of one of their own sex, "She is as vain as a man," and they will have perfect reason. The bearded creatures are quite as eager for praise, quite as finikin over their toilettes, quite as proud of their personal advantages, quite as conscious of their powers of fascination, as any coquette in the world.

Chapter V:

If people would but leave children to themselves; if teachers would cease to bully them; if parents would not insist upon directing their thoughts, and dominating their feelings—those feelings and thoughts which are a mystery to all (for how much do you and I know of each other, of our children, of our fathers, of our neighbour, and how far more beautiful and sacred are the thoughts of the poor lad or girl whom you govern likely to be, than those of the dull and world-corrupted person who rules him?)—if, I say, parents and masters would leave their children alone a little more, small harm would accrue, although a less quantity of as in praesenti might be acquired.

Chapter IX:

...it is with grief and pain, that, as admirers of the British aristocracy, we find ourselves obliged to admit the existence of so many ill qualities in a person whose name is in Debrett.

Id.:

Vanity Fair—Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read—who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted him; and in Vanity Fair he had a higher place than the most brilliant genius or spotless virtue.

Chapter X:

All old women were beauties once, we very well know.

Id.:

He was always thinking of his brother’s soul, or of the souls of those who differed with him in opinion: it is a sort of comfort which many of the serious give themselves.

Chapter XIII:

The old gentleman pronounced these aristocratic names with the greatest gusto. Whenever he met a great man he grovelled before him, and my-lorded him as only a free-born Briton can do.

Chapter XIV:

Her heart was dead long before her body. She had sold it to become Sir Pitt Crawley's wife. Mothers and daughters are making the same bargain every day in Vanity Fair.

Chapter XVI:

If people only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be!

Chapter XVIII:

One of the great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.

Chapter XIX:

But, without preaching, the truth may surely be borne in mind, that the bustle, and triumph, and laughter, and gaiety which Vanity Fair exhibits in public, do not always pursue the performer into private life, and that the most dreary depression of spirits and dismal repentances sometimes overcome him. Recollection of the best ordained banquets will scarcely cheer sick epicures. Reminiscences of the most becoming dresses and brilliant ball triumphs will go very little way to console faded beauties. Perhaps statesmen, at a particular period of existence, are not much gratified at thinking over the most triumphant divisions; and the success or the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very small account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view, about which all of us must some day or other be speculating. O brother wearers of motley! Are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This, dear friends and companions, is my amiable object—to walk with you through the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there; and that we should all come home after the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be perfectly miserable in private.

Chapter XXIX:

...a wonderful thing it is to think that the human heart is capable of generating such produce, and can throw out, as occasion demands, such a supply of lust and fury, rage and hatred.

Chapter XXXI:

Did we know what our intimates and dear relations thought of us, we should live in a world that we should be glad to quit, and in a frame of mind and a constant terror, that would be perfectly unbearable.

Chapter XXXV:

He firmly believed that everything he did was right, that he ought on all occasions to have his own way—and like the sting of a wasp or serpent his hatred rushed out armed and poisonous against anything like opposition. He was proud of his hatred as of everything else. Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?

Chapter XLI:

And for my part I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral senses—the very easiest to be deadened when wakened, and in some never wakened at all. We grieve at being found out and at the idea of shame or punishment, but the mere sense of wrong makes very few people unhappy in Vanity Fair.

Chapter XLIX:

"My wife says you have been singing like an angel," he said to Becky. Now there are angels of two kinds, and both sorts, it is said, are charming in their way.

Chapter LII:

Rawdon Crawley, though the only book which he studied was the Racing Calendar, and though his chief recollections of polite learning were connected with the floggings which he received at Eton in his early youth, had that decent and honest reverence for classical learning which all English gentlemen feel, and was glad to think that his son was to have a provision for life, perhaps, and a certain opportunity of becoming a scholar.

Id.:

He tried to look knowing over the Latin grammar when little Rawdon showed him what part of that work he was "in." "Stick to it, my boy," he said to him with much gravity, "there's nothing like a good classical education! Nothing!"

Chapter LVI:

A few years before, he used to be savage, and inveigh against all parsons, scholars, and the like declaring that they were a pack of humbugs, and quacks that weren’t fit to get their living but by grinding Latin and Greek, and a set of supercilious dogs that pretended to look down upon British merchants and gentlemen, who could buy up half a hundred of 'em. He would mourn now, in a very solemn manner, that his own education had been neglected, and repeatedly point out, in pompous orations to Georgy, the necessity and excellence of classical acquirements.

Id.:

And whenever he spoke (which he did almost always), he took care to produce the very finest and longest words of which the vocabulary gave him the use, rightly judging that it was as cheap to employ a handsome, large, and sonorous epithet, as to use a little stingy one.

Chapter LVIII:

If I had time and dared to enter into digressions, I would write a chapter about that first pint of porter drunk upon English ground. Ah, how good it is! It is worth-while to leave home for a year, just to enjoy that one draught.

Chapter LXI:

Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, "To-morrow, success or failure won’t matter much, and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil."

Chapter LXIV:

Those who know the English Colonies abroad know that we carry with us our pride, pills, prejudices, Harvey-sauces, cayenne-peppers, and other Lares, making a little Britain wherever we settle down.

The Path of an Arrow

2012-01-05T11:52:00.004-06:00

Joseph Addison, from The Spectator, No. 26 (Friday, March 30, 1711):

I Yesterday pass'd a whole Afternoon in the Church-yard, the Cloysters, and the Church, amusing myself with the Tomb-stones and Inscriptions that I met with in those several Regions of the Dead. Most of them recorded nothing else of the buried Person, but that he was born upon one Day and died upon another: The whole History of his Life, being comprehended in those two Circumstances, that are common to all Mankind. I could not but look upon these Registers of Existence, whether of Brass or Marble, as a kind of Satyr upon the departed Persons; who had left no other Memorial of them, but that they were born and that they died. They put me in mind of several Persons mentioned in the Battles of Heroic Poems, who have sounding Names given them, for no other Reason but that they may be killed, and are celebrated for nothing but being knocked on the Head.
Γλαῦκόν τε Μέδοντά τε Θερσίλοχόν τε.—Hom.
Glaucumque, Medontaque, Thersilochumque.—Virg.
The Life of these Men is finely described in Holy Writ by the Path of an Arrow which is immediately closed up and lost.

Upon my going into the Church, I entertain'd my self with the digging of a Grave; and saw in every Shovel-full of it that was thrown up, the Fragment of a Bone or Skull intermixt with a kind of fresh mouldering Earth that some time or other had a Place in the Composition of an humane Body. Upon this, I began to consider with my self, what innumerable Multitudes of People lay confus'd together under the Pavement of that ancient Cathedral; how Men and Women, Friends and Enemies, Priests and Soldiers, Monks and Prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in the same common Mass; how Beauty, Strength, and Youth, with Old-age, Weakness, and Deformity, lay undistinguish'd in the same promiscuous Heap of Matter.

....

When I look upon the Tombs of the Great, every Emotion of Envy dies in me; when I read the Epitaphs of the Beautiful, every inordinate Desire goes out; when I meet with the Grief of Parents upon a Tombstone, my Heart melts with Compassion; when I see the Tomb of the Parents themselves, I consider the Vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow: When I see Kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival Wits placed Side by Side, or the holy Men that divided the World with their Contests and Disputes, I reflect with Sorrow and Astonishment on the little Competitions, Factions and Debates of Mankind. When I read the several Dates of the Tombs, of some that dy'd Yesterday, and some six hundred Years ago, I consider that great Day when we shall all of us be Contemporaries, and make our Appearance together.

In less than a decade, Addison himself would be laid to rest in that same place, Westminster Abbey.

The Obligation to Support Indigent Parents

2012-01-04T10:38:00.004-06:00

At Underbelly there is an interesting post on laws that oblige adult children to pay for the care of their indigent parents. For a list of relevant state statutes see Seymour Moskowitz, "Adult Children and Indigent Parents: Intergenerational Responsibilities in International Perspective," 86 Marq. L. Rev. 401 (2002) (at 422-3, n. 115).

I had been giving some thought to moving from the snowy North to "das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn," or at any rate where the peach trees blossom, that is, to Georgia, where my son lives. But Georgia is on the list of states with filial responsibility statutes:

The father, mother, or child of any pauper contemplated by Code Section 36-12-2, if sufficiently able, shall support the pauper. Any county having provided for such pauper upon the failure of such relatives to do so may bring an action against such relatives of full age and recover for the provisions so furnished. The certificate of the judge of the probate court that the person was poor and was unable to sustain himself and that he was maintained at the expense of the county shall be presumptive evidence of such maintenance and the costs thereof.

Georgia Code § 36-12-3. If I end up in the poor house, I don't want my children to be on the hook for my upkeep.

Such laws have a long pedigree. According to Diogenes Laertius (1.55, tr. R.D. Hicks), Solon enacted a law providing that "if any man neglects to provide for his parents, he shall be disenfranchised." Cf. Demosthenes 24.107 (tr. J.H. Vince):

What adequate satisfaction can you render, or by what punishment can you be punished as you deserve, you who, to say nothing of the rest, subvert the laws that protect old age, that compel the maintenance of parents in their lifetime, and ensure that they shall be honoured with due observance when they die?

See David Whitehead, "Goneis in Athenian Law (and Perception)," Electronic Antiquity 13.1 (November 2009) 27-56 (especially 43-44) for details.

Lottery of Life

2012-01-04T09:39:00.000-06:00

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848), Chapter LVII:

"There must be classes—there must be rich and poor," Dives says, smacking his claret (it is well if he even sends the broken meat out to Lazarus sitting under the window). Very true; but think how mysterious and often unaccountable it is—that lottery of life which gives to this man the purple and fine linen, and sends to the other rags for garments and dogs for comforters.

Watson's Latinity

2012-01-03T07:03:00.003-06:00

In response to Scholar and Murderer, Ian Jackson kindly sent me some pages copied from Beryl Bainbridge, Watson’s Apology (London: Duckworth, 1984). Pages 171-173 purport to be letters to The Times on the subject of Watson's Latinity. Bainbridge cautions on p. 6 that "The documents presented have been edited here and there to fit the needs of the narrative, but are otherwise authentic."

I reproduce here the letters, which are mostly self-explanatory, although it might be useful to know that "Mr Denman" was the prosecutor in the murder trial. I've suggested some emendations in square brackets, and I've repaired the accentuation of the Greek in the Hertford Scholar's letter, by moving a circumflex accent from an omicron, in Bainbridge's transcription, to its proper place over the immediately following upsilon.

Sir, It appears to me that the Latin phrase found among Mr Watson's papers has been so construed by Mr Denman as to do him an injustice. 'Saepe olim amanti nocuit semper amare.' Mr Denman construes it allowing that it must be bad Latin if it means what he thinks, 'To one who has so often loved it has always been harmful to love,' giving, to say the least, an unamiable turn to the poor man's reflections upon his life [sic, read wife?]. I would ask better scholars than myself whether it is not perfectly good Latin for 'To one who has acquired the habit of loving it has often been an injury not to cease to love.'
    Yours, G.Y., Lincoln's Inn

Sir, Mr Watson's Latin seems to me very indifferent. But the most obvious construction ought to be the following: 'Saepe nocuit olim amanti semper amare' — 'It was often injurious or fatal to a man who once loved to go on forever loving', i.e. to pretend to love on, to insist on a love which no longer exists. This, of course, refers to Mr Watson's case, all whose calamities, by his own account, arose from his continuing to live with a wife whom he once loved, but life with whom had now become insupportable.
    It must be observed that in the two versions mentioned by 'G.Y.', no account is taken of the 'olim', which is the key-stone of the sentence.
    I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant
        G., Lincoln's Inn

Sir, It is amusing to see how much mystery can be made out of nothing. If a fifth form schoolboy at Eton (which I was once myself) were asked to translate 'Saepe olim amanti nocuit semper amare', he would go it thus, and he would be right: 'Saepe' (often) 'olim' (heretofore) 'semper amare', here used as a substantive, (constant love) 'nocuit' (has been injurious) 'amanti' (to the lover). This, no doubt, is bald enough, but dress it up a little, and use Shakespeare's formula slightly changed:
Ah, me for all that ever I could learn,
Could ever read in tale or history,
True love hath often been the lover's bane.
In this garb, I doubt not, both Mr Denman and 'G.Y.' will recognise their own extraordinary shortcomings and a solution of all their difficulties, which they will pardon me for thinking are rather to be attributed to their acquaintance with bad Latin than good.
    I am, sir, your obedient servant,
        Winchilsea.
P.S.: What would Mr Watson himself say of two such versions as these?
To one who has often loved it has always been harmful to love. Denman.
and
To one who has acquired the habit of loving, it has often been an injury not to cease to love. G.Y.
Why, if he were an Eton Master, he would put them both 'in the bill.'

Sir, Whatever poor Mr Watson may have to answer for, he has not yet been convicted of writing bad Latin. Your ingenious correspondents from Lincoln's Inn seem, however, to impute this to him. The word 'olim', as every scholar knows, means 'in the far-off line' [sic, read time?], which may be either past or future, but the phrase 'olim amanti' involves a contradiction in terms. The moment you attach an adverb to 'amanti' you restore it to its verbal or participial force — 'one who loves in the present' — and deprive it of its abstract meaning, 'amatori', or lover.
    Lord Winchilsea's construction is undoubtedly the right one. The Latin sentence, which I need not repeat here, simply means: 'Often ere now has the lover suffered from the constancy of his love.' This is good sense, applies to Mr Watson's case, and no one can fairly cavil at Mr Watson's rendering of it.
    These 'nugae' may seem out of place when a man is on trial for his life, but the Law-Latinists must not be allowed to have the last word.
    Yours, M.H.C..

Sir, It is hardly fair of your correspondents to assume that the line 'saepe olim amanti nocuit semper amare' must be bad Latin because they cannot interpret it satisfactorily. The Latin is good Latin, and the meaning of the words can be but one, however the application may differ. "Saepe olim' go together, and like πολλάκις ἤδη, πάλαι in Greek, serve to state the result of experience in the form of a proverb. The apparent redundncy of 'saepe olim' is defended by such expressions as 'saepe ante', Sallust, Jugurtha 107,4, — 'saepe ante paucis strenuis advorsum multitudinem bene pugnantium'. The meaning may be explained by the Greek:
πολλάκις ἔβλαψεν ἤδη τὸν φιλοῦντ' ὰεὶ φιλεῖν.
'Often in the experience of men constant love has proved the lover's bane.'
    I am, your humble servant, Hertford Scholar.
    Magdalen College, Oxford.

Sir, Your learned commentators assume too readily that the words in question were meant by the reverend gentleman Mr Watson to apply to himself. May I venture to suggest that they may have been intended rather as an epigraph to the tale 'Hercules' which he had just completed?
    Your readers will remember that the mad Hercules — the Hercules furens of Euripides' play — was successful in all his labours but less fortunate in his dealings with the fair sex. After being required to satisfy the 50 daughters of Thespius in one night, he was forced into employment for sexual purposes by Queen Omphale of Lydia. He was brought down finally by his wife Deianira, who gave him the fatal shirt of Nessus to wear in the fond hope that it would be the means of restoring his love.
    We may wonder too about the legibility of Mr Watson's handwriting in this time of stress. Did he perhaps write not 'amare' (to love) but 'amari' (to be loved) — not 'amanti' (lover) but 'amenti' (madman)? If so, the adage would fit both equally — 'Fortunate in all things except as pertains to the female sex. Often has it harmed a lover (or a madman?) to be pursued by love.'
    Yours etc, CH, Camden Town

This correspondence is now closed — Ed.

Thankless Uphill Work

2012-01-03T05:08:00.002-06:00

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898, also known as Lewis Carroll), Diary, November 26, 1856:

I am weary of lecturing, and discouraged. I examined six or eight men today who are going in for Little-Go, and hardly one of them is really fit to go in. It is thankless uphill work, goading unwilling men to learning they have no taste for, to the inevitable neglect of others who really want to go on.

Little-Go, or Responsions, was the first examination taken by an Oxford undergraduate. "The subjects of the first University examination at Oxford are a Greek and a Latin book, such as two Greek plays and the Georgics (chosen by the candidate himself) to be construed and parsed; a paper of very elementary questions in Latin and Greek grammar; an easy piece of English for translation into Latin prose; arithmetic, to vulgar fractions and decimals; and the first two books of Euclid, or algebra to simple equations." (Report of Her Majesty's Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Revenues and Management of Certain Colleges and Schools... (London: HMSO, 1864), p. 24.) About one fourth of those examined failed. (Id.)

Related post: The Joy of Teaching.

Public Expenditures

2012-01-02T10:39:00.004-06:00

Sue Hubbell, Broadsides from the Other Orders: A Book of Bugs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, c1993), p. 73 (my additions in square brackets):

But despite the evidence that science continues to give us that ours is not the only game in town, we humans still continue to act as though we are the focus of everything that is interesting and important. Animals such as daddy longlegs, even though they are ubiquitous and easily observable, do not have an obvious relationship to us, and therefore are of little interest or importance to grant givers. If anything is to be learned about them it will be by people like [Robert] Hooke or [Alfred] Tulk, who enjoy astonishment; like [James C.] Cokendolpher, who can confess that his work is "really exciting"; like Arlan [L. Edgar], who carries out his research on his own time and with considerable glee.

I would rather see tax dollars spent on the scientific study of animals such as daddy longlegs, than on over-priced, unnecessary military hardware and ineffective social programs.

Related posts:

They'll Spare No Race of Trees

2012-01-02T10:02:00.005-06:00

Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), On Plants, Book VI, tr. Aphra Behn, in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Abraham Cowley, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, Vol. II (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1881; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1967), p. 253:

When (my Companions) these sad things you see,
And each beholds the dead Beams of her Parent-Tree,
Long since repos’d in Palaces of Kings,        1105
Torn down by furious Hands, as useless things;
Then know your Fate is come; Those Hands that cou’d
From Houses tear dead Beams and long-hewn Wood,
Those cruel Hands by unresisted Force
Will for your living Trunks find no Remorse.        1110
    Religion, which was great of old, commands
No Woods shou'd be profaned by impious Hands,
Those noble Seminaries for the Fleet,
Plantations that make Towns and Cities great:
Those Hopes of War, and Ornaments of Peace        1115
Shou'd live secure from any Outrages,
Which now the barbarous Conqueror will invade,
Tear up your Roots, and rifle all your Shade,
For Gain they'll sell you to the cov'tous Buyer,
A Sacrifice to every common Fire,        1120
They'll spare no Race of Trees of any Age,
But murder Infant-Branches in their Rage:
Elms, Beeches, tender Ashes shall be fell'd,
And even the grey and reverend Bark must yield:
The soft, the murmuring Troop shall be no more,        1125
No more with Musick charm, as heretofore;
No more each little Bird shall build her House,
And sing in her Hereditary Boughs,
But only Philomel shall celebrate
In mournful Notes a new unhappy Fate:        1130
The banish'd Hamadryads must be gone,
And take their flight with sad, but silent Moan;
For a Celestial Being ne'er complains,
Whatever be her Grief, in noisie Strains.
The Wood-Gods fly, and whither shall they go,        1135
Not all the British Orb can scarce allow,
A Trunk secure for them to rest in now.
    But yet these wild Saturnals shall not last,
Oppressing Vengeance follows on too fast;
She shakes her brandish'd Steel, and still denies        1140
Length to immoderate Rage and Cruelties.
Do not despond, my Nymphs; that wicked Birth
Th'avenging Powers will chase from off the Earth;
Let 'em hew down the Woods, destroy and burn,
And all the lofty Groves to Ashes turn;        1145
Yet still there will not want a Tree to yield
Timber enough old Tyburn to rebuild,
Where they may hang at last; and this kind one
Shall then revenge the Woods of all their Wrong.

Cowley's Latin (id., pp. 225-226, accents omitted, line numbers added):

Cumque haec eveniunt, Sociae, cum ligna parentum
Defunctaque trabes vestrum, longaque quiete
Compostas olim regum sub turribus altis,
Excisasque furente manu, vulsasque videtis,
Tunc scitote diem vestrum, et lacrymabile fatum        795
Sylvarum venisse; Trabes quae saeva sepultas
Deturbat domibus, non parcet dextera Vivis.
Tunc omnes late Saltus, nemora omnia regni
(Nobile Seminium et Plantaria Classis et Urbis,
Spem Belli, et Pacis certa ornamenta futurae),        800
Religio quae magna olim, nunc maximus Usus
Vivere privatae iubet inviolata securi;
Barbarus invadit Victor, sternitque, soloque
Eruit, atque Igni divendit Avarus Avaro.
Non generi arboreo aut aetati parcitur ulli,        805
Triginta annorum Infantes in limine vitae
Dejiciunt Ulmos, Fagosque Ornosque tenellas,
Nec senium aut cani reverentia corticis obstat.
Pellitur infoelix o semper Musica turba,
Ramorum hospitiis Volucres pelluntur avitis,        810
Flebiliterque novum celebrat Philomela dolorem.
Exul Hamadryadum simul his chorus effugit omnis,
At tacito luctu (neque enim plorare sonorum,
Coelestes decet) et lacrymis stillantibus intus.
Heu fugimus, Sociae, et toto vix orbe Britanno        815
Securos Truncos quos ingrediamur habemus.
Sed non haec semper fera Saturnalia durant;
Immodico nunquam dat tempora longa furori
Instans a tergo Nemesis, quatiensque securim.
Vos ne despondete animos, Vestri Deus ultor        820
Extirpabit eos radicitus et dabit igni.
Sternite nunc sylvas, nemora alta cremate, scelesti,
Non deerit vobis ex qua pendebitis Arbor.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

New Year's Greetings

2012-01-01T11:01:00.002-06:00

Ovid, Fasti 1.65-67 (tr. James George Frazer):

Two-headed Janus, opener of the softly gliding year,
thou who alone of the celestials dost behold thy back,
O come propitious...

Iane biceps, anni tacite labentis origo,
solus de superis qui tua terga vides,
dexter ades...

Bust of Janus, Vatican Museum
Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who writes: "New Year's greetings, and not of the maudlin sort, however more appropriate that might be for 2012." See Oxford English Dictionary, s.vv.:

greet, v.², sense 1.a: intr. To weep, cry, lament, grieve.

greeting, n.²: The action of GREET v.²; lamentation, weeping.

Roots

2012-01-01T09:42:00.003-06:00

Sigurd F. Olson (1899-1982), Listening Point (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), pp. 116-117:

There are many places where people have lived long enough to have sunk their roots deeply, who somehow have absorbed the character of the country they have chosen. I know parts of New England where the people are as native as the partridge in their upland pastures, places in the south where people have the feel of whippoorwills and mockingbirds and magnolias in their blood, and in the west where mountain ranges and purple vistas are a part of their lives. Wherever you go, you will find them, but most always away from the arterials and big towns, in the back country, where they are still living close to the land. Theirs is a certain contentment with things as they are, a perspective that comes only with living in one place a long time, and a loyalty to the old ways that fights change and modernization.

Andrew Wyeth, Turkey Pond

Jane Welsh Learns Latin

2012-01-01T08:40:00.001-06:00

Geraldine Jewsbury, quoted in Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (London: Macmillan and Co., 1887), I, 55, 57 (on Jane Welsh Carlyle):

She was anxious to learn lessons like a boy; and, when a very little thing, she asked her father to let her 'learn Latin like a boy.' Her mother did not wish her to learn so much; her father always tried to push her forwards; there was a division of opinion on the subject. Jeannie went to one of the town scholars in Haddington and made him teach her a noun of the first declension ('Penna, a pen,' I think it was). Armed with this, she watched her opportunity; instead of going to bed, she crept under the table, and was concealed by the cover. In a pause of conversation, a little voice was heard, 'Penna, a pen; pennae, of a pen;' etc., and as there was a pause of surprise, she crept out, and went up to her father saying, 'I want to learn Latin; please let me be a boy.' Of course she had her own way in the matter.

....

She made great progress in Latin, and was in Virgil when nine years old. She always loved her doll; but when she got into Virgil she thought it shame to care for a doll. On her tenth birthday she built a funeral pile of lead pencils and sticks of cinnamon, and poured some sort of perfume over all, to represent a funeral pile. She then recited the speech of Dido, stabbed her doll and let out all the sawdust; after which she consumed her to ashes, and then burst into a passion of tears.

Adam Bede

2011-12-31T06:47:00.004-06:00

Excerpts from George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859).

Chapter I:

"And there's such a thing as being oversperitial; we must have something beside Gospel i' this world. Look at the canals, an' th' aqueducs, an' th' coal-pit engines, and Arkwright's mills there at Cromford; a man must learn summat beside Gospel to make them things, I reckon. But t' hear some o' them preachers, you'd think as a man must be doing nothing all's life but shutting's eyes and looking what's a-going on inside him. I know a man must have the love o' God in his soul, and the Bible's God's word. But what does the Bible say? Why, it says as God put his sperrit into the workman as built the tabernacle, to make him do all the carved work and things as wanted a nice hand. And this is my way o' looking at it: there's the sperrit o' God in all things and all times—weekday as well as Sunday—and i' the great works and inventions, and i' the figuring and the mechanics. And God helps us with our headpieces and our hands as well as with our souls; and if a man does bits o' jobs out o' working hours—builds a oven for's wife to save her from going to the bakehouse, or scrats at his bit o' garden and makes two potatoes grow istead o' one, he's doing more good, and he's just as near to God, as if he was running after some preacher and a-praying and a-groaning."

Id.:

"Some's got one way o' looking at things and some's got another."

Id.:

"Look there, now! I can't abide to see men throw away their tools i' that way, the minute the clock begins to strike, as if they took no pleasure i' their work, and was afraid o' doing a stroke too much....I hate to see a man's arms drop down as if he was shot, before the clock's fairly struck, just as if he'd never a bit o' pride and delight in's work. The very grindstone 'ull go on turning a bit after you loose it."

Chapter II:

"I'll stick up for the pretty women preachin'; I know they'd persuade me over a deal sooner nor th' ugly men."

Chapter IV:

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see eyes—ah, so like our mother's!—averted from us in cold alienation; and our last darling child startles us with the air and gestures of the sister we parted from in bitterness long years ago. The father to whom we owe our best heritage—the mechanical instinct, the keen sensibility to harmony, the unconscious skill of the modelling hand—galls us and puts us to shame by his daily errors; the long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass as our own wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious humours and irrational persistence.

Id.:

...timid people always wreak their peevishness on the gentle.

Id.:

"Aye, aye, that's the way wi' thee: thee allays makes a peck o' thy own words out o' a pint o' the Bible's. I donna see how thee't to know as 'take no thought for the morrow' means all that. An' when the Bible's such a big book, an' thee canst read all thro't, an' ha' the pick o' the texes, I canna think why thee dostna pick better words as donna mean so much more nor they say."

Id.:

"'They that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of those that are weak, and not to please themselves.' There's a text wants no candle to show't; it shines by its own light. It's plain enough you get into the wrong road i' this life if you run after this and that only for the sake o' making things easy and pleasant to yourself. A pig may poke his nose into the trough and think o' nothing outside it; but if you've got a man's heart and soul in you, you can't be easy a-making your own bed an' leaving the rest to lie on the stones. Nay, nay, I'll never slip my neck out o' the yoke, and leave the load to be drawn by the weak uns."

Id.:

When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Chapter V:

"And as to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church-steeple minds the rooks cawing about it."

Id.:

"If I don't like a man's looks, depend upon it I shall never like him. I don't want to know people that look ugly and disagreeable, any more than I want to taste dishes that look disagreeable. If they make me shudder at the first glance, I say, take them away. An ugly, piggish, or fishy eye, now, makes me feel quite ill; it's like a bad smell."

Id.:

His mental palate, indeed, was rather pagan, and found a savouriness in a quotation from Sophocles or Theocritus that was quite absent from any text in Isaiah or Amos. But if you feed your young setter on raw flesh, how can you wonder at its retaining a relish for uncooked partridge in after-life?

Chapter VI:

"As for farming, it's putting money into your pocket wi' your right hand and fetching it out wi' your left. As fur as I can see, it's raising victual for other folks and just getting a mouthful for yourself and your children as you go along."

Chapter X:

"I'n got no taste i' my mouth this day—it's all one what I swaller—it's all got the taste o' sorrow wi't."

Chapter XVI:

On the table, at Mr. Irwine's elbow, lay the first volume of the Foulis Aeschylus, which Arthur knew well by sight; and the silver coffee-pot, which Carroll was bringing in, sent forth a fragrant steam which completed the delights of a bachelor breakfast.

Chapter XVII:

These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people—amongst whom your life is passed—that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire—for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.

Id.:

"I began to see as all this weighing and sifting what this text means and that text means, and whether folks are saved all by God's grace, or whether there goes an ounce o' their own will to't, was no part o' real religion at all. You may talk o' these things for hours on end, and you'll only be all the more coxy and conceited for't."

Chapter XVIII:

Mr. Poyser had no reason to be ashamed of his leg, and suspected that the growing abuse of top-boots and other fashions tending to disguise the nether limbs had their origin in a pitiable degeneracy of the human calf.

Id.:

"We shall all on us be dead some time, I reckon—it 'ud be better if folks 'ud make much on us beforehand, i'stid o' beginnin' when we're gone."

Chapter XX:

"...there can be nothing to look at pleasanter nor a fine milch cow, standing up to'ts knees in pasture, and the new milk frothing in the pail, and the fresh butter ready for market, and the calves, and the poultry."

Chapter XXIV:

"Oh, sir, the men are mostly so tongue-tied—you're forced partly to guess what they mean, as you do wi' the dumb creaturs."

Chapter XXVI:

"I know the dancin's nonsense, but if you stick at everything because it's nonsense, you wonna go far i' this life. When your broth's ready-made for you, you mun swallow the thickenin', or else let the broth alone."

Chapter XXXVII:

Religious doctrines had taken no hold on Hetty's mind. She was one of those numerous people who have had godfathers and godmothers, learned their catechism, been confirmed, and gone to church every Sunday, and yet, for any practical result of strength in life, or trust in death, have never appropriated a single Christian idea or Christian feeling.

Chapter XLVI:

"What does it matter to me, lad?" Bartle said: "a night's sleep more or less? I shall sleep long enough, by and by, underground. Let me keep thee company in trouble while I can."

Chapter LII:

"I don't put my soul above yours, as if my words was better for you to follow than your own conscience."

Chapter LIII:

"But there's Mills, now, sits i' the chimney-corner and reads the paper pretty nigh from morning to night, and when he's got to th' end on't he's more addle-headed than he was at the beginning. He's full o' this peace now, as they talk on; he's been reading and reading, and thinks he's got to the bottom on't. 'Why, Lor' bless you, Mills,' says I, 'you see no more into this thing nor you can see into the middle of a potato.'"

Id.:

"As for other things, I daresay she's like the rest o' the women—thinks two and two 'll come to make five, if she cries and bothers enough about it."

Chapter LIV:

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?

A World of Wounds

2011-12-29T06:21:00.000-06:00

Aldo Leopold, Round River (1953; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 165:

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

The Old Horatian Forbearance

2011-12-29T06:11:00.003-06:00

Edward FitzGerald, letter to E.B. Cowell (January 9, 1876), in The Letters of Edward FitzGerald, edd. Alfred McKinley Terhune and Annabelle Burdick Terhune, Vol. III: 1867-1876 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 645-646 (at 646, with the editors' note 2):

I see by the Athenaeum that Browning and Swinburne go on pouring out Volumes of Verse. I wonder it does not strike them it would be better to follow the old Horatian forbearance for nine years:² I suppose Gray brooded over his one little Elegy for all that time: and (with all its faults) it endures—as I think nothing which these more aspiring Geniuses do will.

² Nine or ten years elapsed between the appearance of the first three books of Horace's Odes (23 B.C.) and the fourth (14-13). Subsequently, in one of his Epistles, the poet states that he had intended to abandon lyric poetry, but, in fact, he produced other works during the decade.

This is a very misleading note. FitzGerald was of course referring to a well-known passage in Horace's Ars Poetica, lines 385-390 (emphasis added):

tu nihil invita dices faciesve Minerva;
id tibi iudicium est, ea mens. si quid tamen olim
scripseris, in Maeci descendat iudicis auris
et patris et nostras, nonumque prematur in annum,
membranis intus positis: delere licebit
quod non edideris; nescit vox missa reverti.

In H. Rushton Fairclough's translation:

But you will say nothing and do nothing against Minerva's will; such is your judgement, such your good sense. Yet if ever you do write anything, let it enter the ears of some critical Maecius, and your father's and my own; then put your parchment in the closet and keep it back till the ninth year. What you have not published you can destroy; the word once sent forth can never come back.

The Great Twalmley

2011-12-28T09:05:00.002-06:00

James Boswell, Life of Johnson (anno 1783, aetat. 74):

Once, when checking my boasting too frequently of myself in company, he said to me, 'Boswell, you often vaunt so much, as to provoke ridicule. You put me in mind of a man who was standing in the kitchen of an inn with his back to the fire, and thus accosted the person next him, "Do you know, Sir, who I am?" "No, Sir, (said the other,) I have not that advantage." "Sir, (said he,) I am the great TWALMLEY, who invented the New Floodgate Iron¹."'

¹What the great Twalmley was so proud of having invented, was neither more nor less than a kind of box-iron for smoothing linen.

I have met many descendants of the great Twalmley.

Indictment of the Present Age

2011-12-28T06:47:00.003-06:00

Henry W. Chandler (1828-1889), A Practical Introduction to Greek Accentuation, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881), pp. xxii-xxiii (preface to the second edition):

One serious omission there is which I much regret, and for which, in any country governed rationally, I should incur a heavy penalty. To make the present work really useful, it ought to have a complete index of all the Greek words mentioned in it, amounting on a rough estimate to some twenty thousand. I would have constructed one myself, only the fact is that it requires keener eyesight and greater patience than I possess. A hundred years ago it would have been easy enough to find in this place a score of mere schoolboys, anyone of whom would have been willing and able to execute such a task with neatness, quickness, and accuracy; but nowadays, thanks to the spread of omniscience, it is difficult to meet with a young scholar who is sufficiently acquainted with his Greek grammar to be entrusted with such a work as an index; and as to zeal, industry, and accuracy, where are they to be discovered?

In bidding a last farewell to a subject in which I never took more than a languid interest, I may be permitted to say that in England, at all events, every man will accent his Greek properly who wishes to stand well with the world. He whose accents are irreproachable may indeed be no better than a heathen, but concerning that man who misplaces them, or worse still, altogether omits them, damaging inferences will certainly be drawn, and in most instances with justice.

Hat tip: Alan Crease.

Scholar and Murderer

2011-12-27T06:32:00.004-06:00

Personal Remembrances of Sir Frederick Pollock, Vol. II (London: Macmillan and Co., 1887), p. 237 (diary entry for February 1, 1872):

Dined Sir Thomas Watson's. Lord Chancellor and Lady Hatherley, Sir T. Henry, Boxall, George Richmond, etc. An unfortunate clergyman, bearing the same name as our host, had been tried three weeks before at the Old Bailey and convicted of murdering his wife, but sentenced to confinement for life as a lunatic. He had used the Latin words, "Saepe olim semper debere nocuit debitori," in an exculpatory statement written by him, and Sir T. Henry said that nothing had given Mr. Watson so much pain in the whole proceedings as having had his Latinity questioned. The Chancellor said that Lowe had divided the Cabinet upon it, and that he had voted in the majority affirming it to be good Latin.

On the identity of this "unfortunate clergyman" see W.P. Courtney and H.C.G. Matthew in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

Watson, John Selby (bap. 1804, d. 1884), scholar and murderer, baptized at Crayford church on 30 December 1804, is stated to have been the son of humble parents in Scotland. He was educated at first by his grandfather, and then at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated BA in 1838, being one of the gold medallists in classics, and proceeded MA in 1844. On 30 March 1854 he was admitted ad eundem at Oxford. He was ordained deacon in 1839 by the bishop of Ely, and priest in 1840 by the bishop of Bath and Wells, and from 1839 to 1841 he served the curacy of Langport in Somerset.

Watson continued his classical studies, and began a lifelong habit of writing. From 1844 he was headmaster of the Stockwell grammar school in the London suburbs. Watson continued to publish classical and other works. He translated many Latin authors for Bohn's Classical Library and wrote several biographies, including those of George Fox (1860), Richard Porson (1861), William Wallace (1861), and Bishop Warburton (1863), and Wilkes and Cobbett (1870). He wrote on the reasoning power of animals (1867) and prepared several other works, including a history of the papacy to 1530. He expected pupils to match his level of erudition. Not surprisingly, the number of pupils in his school declined and he was dismissed as headmaster in September 1870.

Watson lived from 1865 at 28 St Martin's Road, Stockwell, and there, in a fit of passion, he killed his wife on 8 October 1871. Her skull was fractured, probably by a horse-pistol in Watson's possession. She was an Irishwoman named Anne Armstrong, to whom he was married at St Mark's Church, Dublin, in January 1845. Three days after the murder he attempted to commit suicide by taking prussic acid, purchased a year earlier. He wrote a long suicide note, admitting his crime and giving instructions for the publication of his literary remnants. He claimed the loss of his post as ‘the principal cause’ of his melancholy. Watson was tried for murder at the Old Bailey and found guilty, but recommended to mercy, and the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. The ‘Stockwell murder’ and Watson's condition attracted much curiosity. Watson, ein unglücklicher Ehemann. Psychologische Studien über die Ehe was published at Berlin in 1875. Watson died at Parkhurst prison in the Isle of Wight on 6 July 1884 after a fall from his hammock, and was buried in Carisbrooke cemetery.

Among the sources listed by Courtney and Matthew are the following issues of The Times: January 11, 12, and 13, 1872; and July 8, 1884 (all unavailable to me).

In two letters to William Aldis Wright (January 20 and January 22, 1872), Edward FitzGerald mentions in passing the question of Watson's Latinity: see More Letters of Edward Fitzgerald (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1901), p. 139, n. 1, where the editor (FitzGerald's correspondent Wright) points out that Sir Frederick Pollock misquoted Watson, whose words were actually:

Felix in omnibus fere rebus praeterquam quod ad sexum attinet femineum. Saepe olim amanti semper amare nocuit.

At any rate, this is the mark of a true scholar, to feel more shame about a possible Latin mistake than about an act of murder.

I haven't seen Beryl Bainbridge's novel based on this murder case, Watson's Apology (London: Duckworth, 1984).

At My Own Doorstep

2011-12-26T08:13:00.003-06:00

Bernd Heinrich, In a Patch of Fireweed: A Biologist's Life in the Field (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984; rpt. 1991), pp. 192-194:

I used to dream of exotic animals in far-off places, the steaming jungles of South America or the plains of East Africa. I still do. But with time I'm discovering more and more excitement at my own doorstep. Much of nature is subtle, and it is difficult to appreciate it if one is used to the grandiose. I doubt that I would have stopped to watch a mere beetle, a bird, or an ant if I had had a toy train to play with when I was young—a train that rumbled and tooted and sped on fast tracks at the touch of a button. I became attuned to spending hours watching a bird just to see what it brought back to the nest, getting pleasure from discovering the subtleties. It is the subtlety of a bird or a carabid or an ant, multiplied a few million times over, that makes the whole. If one is not attuned to the fact of the first subtlety, then all the rest can pass unnoticed also, just as one sees only the train with the loud whistle rumbling past.

Living on my hill has given me a store of observations and ideas that vary in detail from sightings, like those of the beetles and wasps, to impressions and to qualitative observations, like those of my ants. Any one of them could potentially be expanded into a full-blown research project. Yet the projects I have already done on bees, wasps, and moths show me projects that still need to be done in those areas; the more questions you answer, the more are revealed. "Completed" projects are often jumping-off places for others, and thus you maintain momentum in a certain direction.

....

Although a number of factors might predispose me to specific projects, I am also open to unforeseen events. Throughout my life so far, I have never been able to predict all of what the next day will bring. Here on my hill there are interesting things all around me. I don't know beforehand what I will see, what ideas I will have, and what ideas and observations of other researchers will make me curious about things I might otherwise take for granted. What I do know is that there is enough here to occupy me a lifetime.

Isaak Levitan, Small Hut in a Meadow
Thanks to my daughter, who gave me Heinrich's book as a Christmas present.

Related posts:

Merry Christmas from Herman Melville

2011-12-25T07:00:00.002-06:00

Thanks to Robert J. O'Hara for what follows.

It was on a Christmas afternoon, "some years ago — never mind how long precisely," that the ill-fated Pequod set sail from Nantucket. In the paratactic style he learned from Homer and the Old Testament, here's how Ishmael recalled it:

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.

Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his
steady notes were heard,—
“Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,
Stand dressed in living green.
So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between.”
Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They were full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.

And courtesy of the Eugene Sacred Harp Singers (mediated by YouTube) we can hear the tune "Jordan" by William Billings that Capt. Bildad was singing that Christmas — the tune Melville's readers would have had in their ears as they read:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccSpKKrayhQ.

By Thine Own Sweet Light

2011-12-25T06:41:00.003-06:00

Richard Crashaw, In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord God, lines 15 ff.:

We saw Thee in Thy balmy nest,
        Young dawn of our eternal day;
We saw Thine eyes break from the East,
        And chase the trembling shades away:
We saw Thee, and we bless the sight,
We saw Thee by Thine own sweet light.

Poor World, said I, what wilt thou do
        To entertain this starry stranger?
Is this the best thou canst bestow—
        A cold and not too cleanly manger?
Contend, the powers of heaven and earth,
To fit a bed for this huge birth.

Proud world, said I, cease your contest,
        And let the mighty babe alone;
The phoenix builds the phoenix' nest,
        Love's architecture is His own.
The babe, whose birth embraves this morn,
Made His own bed ere He was born.

I saw the curl'd drops, soft and slow,
        Come hovering o'er the place's head,
Off'ring their whitest sheets of snow,
        To furnish the fair infant's bed.
Forbear, said I; be not too bold;
Your Fleece is white, but 'tis too cold.

In 1921 Gwen Raverat designed a Christmas card (published by Lund, Humphries & Co., Ltd.) with the words "The Festival of Christmas" on the front, with the text as printed above inside (entitled Verses from the Shepherd's Hymn), and with the following engraving facing the text:

Thanks to the dear friend who sent me Raverat's Christmas card as a gift.

Two Christmas Songs

2011-12-24T09:05:00.003-06:00

Thanks to Ian Jackson for sending these Christmas songs, translated by the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford:

An Auto-Antonym: Frugal?

2011-12-24T08:40:00.002-06:00

Edward FitzGerald, letter to W.A. Wright (March 7, 1869), in The Letters of Edward FitzGerald, edd. Alfred McKinley Terhune and Annabelle Burdick Terhune, Vol. III: 1867-1876 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 130-133 (at 132):

Frugal. Forby notices the Norfolk use of this word (also found in Shakespeare's Merry Wives) in exactly the contrary sense to the modern: sc: lavish, instead of sparing. My nephew Edmund Kerrich was telling me one day an odd instance. His Father's Gamekeeper would say some morning as they went out shooting—"That dog's uncommonly frugal this morning"—meaning, un-costive.

Forby is Robert Forby, The Vocabulary of East Anglia, Vol. I (London: J.B. Nichols and Son, 1830), pp. 124-125:

FRUGAL, adj. the reverse of COSTLY, q. v. This word seems quite distinct from frugal in its current sense. Instances may, indeed, be produced in different languages, of the same word bearing even opposite senses, under different circumstances. The word sacer, in Latin is a very familiar one, sometimes meaning hallowed, sometimes accursed; which sense it bears in any particular passage, must be determined by the context or the occasion. But in each case its etymon is the same. On the contrary, our word, now under consideration, is likely to be of an origin very different from that of the common word, with which it agrees in every letter. "Good woman," quoth the village doctress, "is your child costive?" "Costly! Ma'am, no, quite the contrary, sadly frugal indeed!" So much for modern use. But have we any thing like authority for it in O.E.? We will have recourse to SH. In the Merry Wives of Windsor, Mrs. Page, on receiving Falstaff's love letter, ponders "What unweighed behaviour he could have picked out of her conversation." She presently concludes, "I was, then, too frugal of my mirth. Heaven forgive me!" She could not possibly mean too sparing. It would be nonsense; she must mean too free. The commentators are puzzled, and no wonder. Dr. Johnson says, he once thought "not" ought to be inserted before "too." But it seems his second thoughts were better, for he has not inserted it in the text. The puzzling word frugal stands alone in all the old editions. Now, without presuming to unsettle the derivation of the common word frugal, from the Latin frugi or fruges, or whatever may best please Vossius, or whom else it may concern, we may look at home for that of our frugal and Shakspeare's; and feel pretty confident that we find it, with only a very common change of one vowel. To adapt it to its Saxon origin, and to distinguish from a word of meaning so different, it might be spelled frugle. A.s. frig, liber.

Samuel Johnson's note on Merry Wives of Windsor 2.1.26 (I was then frugal of my mirth, &c.):

By breaking this speech into exclamations, the text may stand; but I once thought it must be read If I was not then frugal of my mirth.

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't recognize the sense lavish.

A Bad Smell

2011-12-24T08:32:00.001-06:00

Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (New York: Harper & Row, 1928), p. 301:

You've got to persuade everybody that all this grand industrial civilization is just a bad smell and that the real, significant life can only be lived apart from it. It'll be a very long time before decent living and industrial smell can be reconciled. Perhaps, indeed, they're irreconcilable. It remains to be seen. In the meantime, at any rate, we must shovel the garbage and bear the smell stoically, and in the intervals try to lead the real human life.

Hat tip: Andrew Rickard, whose new blog I highly recommend. This quotation comes from his post titled Bear the Smell Stoically.

The Direct Method

2011-12-23T09:01:00.001-06:00

Christopher Stray, "Postgate, John Percival (1853–1926)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

The children included Raymond Postgate, later well known as a journalist and as the author of the Good Food Guide, and Dame Margaret Cole, who married the socialist economic historian G.D.H. Cole. In her memoirs, she remembered the atmosphere of early family life in Cambridge. Postgate's enthusiasm for learning Latin by the direct method (by speaking the language) was evidenced at mealtimes; at one Sunday dinner Margaret asked da mihi bovem ('give me the ox') instead of da mihi bovis ('give me some beef'), and found the whole vast sirloin thrust at her.

Thanks to Alan Crease for drawing my attention to this anecdote.

A Certain Slant of Light

2011-12-21T07:48:00.005-06:00

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886):

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are—

None may teach it—Any—
'Tis the Seal Despair—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air—

When it comes, the Landscape listens—
Shadows—hold their breath—
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death—

Walter Launt Palmer (1854-1932),
Winter Sunlight

De Liberis Educandis

2011-12-20T04:17:00.002-06:00

Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), quoted by Abraham Pais in A Tale of Two Continents: A Physicist's Life in a Turbulent World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 205:

Children should neither be seen nor heard until they can quote Virgil in Latin.

Lewis Hine, Boy Studying
Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

O Dulce Otium!

2011-12-20T04:12:00.002-06:00

Pliny the Younger, Letters 1.9 (to Minicius Fundanus, tr. Betty Radice):

It is extraordinary how, if one takes a single day spent in Rome, one can give a more or less accurate account of it, but scarcely any account at all of several days put together. If you ask anyone what he did that day, the answer would be: 'I was present at a coming-of-age ceremony, betrothal, or a wedding. I was called on to witness a will, to support someone in court or to act as assessor.' All this seems important on the actual day, but quite pointless if you consider that you have done the same sort of thing every day, and still more pointless if you think about it when you are out of town. It is then that you realize how many days you have wasted in trivialities.

I always realize this when I am at Laurentum, reading and writing and finding time to take the exercise which keeps my mind fit for work. There is nothing there for me to say or hear said which I would afterwards regret, no one disturbs me with malicious gossip, and I have no one to blame—but myself —when writing doesn't come easily. Hopes and fears do not worry me, and I am not bothered by idle talk; I share my thoughts with no one but my books. It is a good life and a genuine one, a seclusion which is happy and honourable, more rewarding than almost any 'business' can be. The sea and shore are truly my private Helicon, an endless source of inspiration. You should take the first opportunity yourself to leave the din, the futile bustle and useless occupations of the city and devote yourself to literature or to leisure. For it was wise as well as witty of our friend Atilius to say that it is better to have no work to do than to work at nothing.

Pliny's letter in Latin:

Mirum est, quam singulis diebus in urbe ratio aut constet aut constare videatur, pluribus iunctisque non constet. Nam si quem interroges "Hodie quid egisti?" respondeat: "Officio togae virilis interfui, sponsalia aut nuptias frequentavi, ille me ad signandum testamentum, ille in advocationem, ille in consilium rogavit." Haec quo die feceris, necessaria; eadem, si quotidie fecisse te reputes, inania videntur, multo magis, cum secesseris. Tunc enim subit recordatio: "Quot dies quam frigidis rebus absumpsi!"

Quod evenit mihi, postquam in Laurentino meo aut lego aliquid aut scribo aut etiam corpori vaco, cuius fulturis animus sustinetur. Nihil audio, quod audisse, nihil dico, quod dixisse paeniteat; nemo apud me quemquam sinistris sermonibus carpit, neminem ipse reprehendo, nisi tamen me, cum parum comode scribo; nulla spe, nullo timore sollicitor, nullis rumoribus inquietor, mecum tantum et cum libellis loquor. O rectam sinceramque vitam! O dulce otium honestumque ac paene omni negotio pulchrius! O mare, o litus, verum secretumque μουσεῖον, quam multa invenitis, quam multa dictatis! Proinde tu quoque strepitum istum inanemque discursum et multum ineptos labores, ut primum fuerit occasio, relinque teque studiis vel otio trade. Satius est enim, ut Atilius noster eruditissime simul et facetissime dixit, otiosum esse quam nihil agere.

Borges as Opsimath

2011-12-19T09:49:00.001-06:00

Eric Ormsby, Facsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translation (Erin: The Porcupine's Quill, 2001), p. 162 (in "Jorge Luis Borges and the Plural I"):

Polyglot from childhood, fluent in English, French, German and, of course, Spanish, and having taught himself Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse in middle age, Borges finally embarked on the study of Classical Arabic with an Egyptian tutor whom he met in Geneva in the last year of his life. He was then eighty-six.

A Very Superficial Scholar

2011-12-19T09:37:00.001-06:00

Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), letter to E.B. Cowell (January 28, 1845):

I was very happy to receive your letter: and also that I was able to construe your French, and your Greek. As I hope, at least: for I am a very superficial scholar: having much neglected to learn when I was at school: and having but in the past ten years dug out of dictionaries and grammars just enough to give me some insight into the great Authors—long dead. This kind of Scholarship lies much on the surface—soon come soon gone: I believe that I have got some of the substance of these great Authors into my head, and am able to estimate what room they fill in the learning of the world—but the languages they wrote in slide and slide away from my head: and I know not if I shall have time or patience in future to keep up a serviceable amount of Latin and Greek. And yet how easy to read Homer every year: and three or four Greek Plays: and some Plato—some Tacitus; all Virgil's Georgics!

Tragedy

2011-12-19T09:34:00.002-06:00

D.H. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 291 (from "Nottingham and the Mining Countryside"):

The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely; the man-made England so vile.

Cf. the first sentence of Rousseau's Émile (tr. William H. Payne):

Everything is good as it comes the hands of the Author of Nature; but everything degenerates in the hands of men.

Tout est bien, sortant des mains de l'Auteur des choses; tout dégénere entre les mains de l'homme.

Pyrrho and the Pig

2011-12-18T07:13:00.002-06:00

Diogenes Laertius 9.68 (on Pyrrho, tr. R.D. Hicks):

When his fellow-passengers on board a ship were all unnerved by a storm, he kept calm and confident, pointing to a little pig in the ship that went on eating, and telling them that such was the unperturbed state in which the wise man should keep himself.

τῶν γὰρ συμπλεόντων ἐσκυθρωπακότων ὑπὸ χειμῶνος, αὐτὸς γαληνὸς ὢν ἀνέρρωσε τὴν ψυχήν, δείξας ἐν τῷ πλοίῳ χοιρίδιον ἐσθίον καὶ εἰπὼν ὡς χρὴ τὸν σοφὸν ἐν τοιαύτῃ καθεστάναι ἀταραξίᾳ.

Pleasing Thoughts

2011-12-16T10:43:00.000-06:00

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953), South Moon Under (1933), Chapter XIII:

It was uninhabited. Where there was true scrub, there would never be human habitation. It pleased the boy that he may have crossed where no man had ever crossed before. It pleased him, that he would come upon no clearing, no cabin, no clatter of human voices.

Good Will to Men

2011-12-16T05:42:00.001-06:00

George Gissing (1857-1903), The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Summer, XIII):

All men my brothers? Nay, thank Heaven, that they are not! I will do harm, if I can help it, to no one; I will wish good to all; but I will make no pretence of personal kindliness where, in the nature of things, it cannot be felt. I have grimaced a smile and pattered unmeaning words to many a person whom I despised or from whom in heart I shrank; I did so because I had not courage to do otherwise. For a man conscious of such weakness, the best is to live apart from the world.

Well-Tim'd Levities Become the Wise

2011-12-15T06:51:00.001-06:00

Leonard Welsted (1688-1747), The Invitation, lines 23-36:

Of what avail is fortune unenjoy'd?
Or what is life, in anxious hours employ'd?
Let the dull miser pine with niggard care,
And brood o'er gold devoted to his heir:
While we in honest mirth send time away,
Regardless what severer Sages say.
In chearful minds unbidden joys arise,
And well-tim'd levities become the wise.
What virtue does not generous Wine impart?
It gives a winning frankness to the heart;
With sprightly hope the drooping spirits arms;
Awakens Love, and brightens Beauty's charms;
High, florid thoughts th' inspiring juices breed;
Spleen they dispell, and clear the brow of need.

Tibullus the Farmer

2011-12-15T06:34:00.004-06:00

Tibullus 1.1.1-10:

Divitias alius fulvo sibi congerat auro
    et teneat culti iugera multa soli,
quem labor adsiduus vicino terreat hoste,
    Martia cui somnos classica pulsa fugent:
me mea paupertas vita traducat inerti,        5
    dum meus adsiduo luceat igne focus.
ipse seram teneras maturo tempore vites
    rusticus et facili grandia poma manu:
nec Spes destituat sed frugum semper acervos
    praebeat et pleno pinguia musta lacu.        10

Some of the following 18th century English translations seem to be based on a Latin text in which Scaliger's transpositions of lines 9-10 after 6, and 29-32 after 8, are accepted. Here are lines 29-32:

nec tamen interdum pudeat tenuisse bidentem
aut stimulo tardos increpuisse boves; 30
non agnamve sinu pigeat fetumve capellae
desertum oblita matre referre domum.

Translated by Leonard Welsted, in Ambrose Philips' Free-Thinker (Oct. 23, 1719):

Let others wealth amass in heaps of gold,
And many acres plow'd with pride behold;
Disturb'd amidst their daily toil with fears,
Oft as the trumpet sound, or foe appears:

The dire alarm repeated still denies
Peace to their mind, and slumber to their eyes:
An humbler life less painful I require,
While in my parlour shines a nightly fire;

Unblighted while my promis'd harvest grows,
And with the racy grape my vat o'erflows:
Of my own farm the husbandman I'll be,
And prune the vine, and plant the apple-tree;

Nor will I scorn the rustic fork to wield,
Or goad the heifer o'er the furrow'd field;
Or in my arms to bear the bleating lamb,
Or kid forsaken of its heedless dam.

Translated by John Dart, in The Works of Tibullus (London: T. Sharpe, 1720):

Let the rich Miser gather golden Gain,
And live the large Possessor of the plain:
Whom Fears perpetual scare with neighb'ring Foes,
And sounding Trumpets wake his soft Repose.

To me the Fates with sparing Hand dispence,
The humbler Sweets of Ease, and Innocence;
Pleas'd in the Pleasures of a still Retreat,
While constant Fires supply the cheerful Seat.

Here I a Countryman, with ready Hand,
When Seasons call, and proper Times demand,
With tender Vines my Vineyard will recruit,
And plant my Orchard with the choicest Fruit;

Nor one ungrateful Produce of the Year
Shall baulk my Labour, or elude my Care,
Whilst bending Boughs their Golden Weight produce,
And frothy Vats o'erflow with purple Juice.

Translated by James Grainger, in A Poetical Translation of the Elegies of Tibullus; and of the Poems of Sulpicia (London: A. Millar, 1759):

The glitt'ring Ore let others vainly heap,
  O'er fertile Vales extend th' inclosing Mound;
With dread of neighb'ring Foes forsake their Sleep,
  And start aghast at ev'ry Trumpet's Sound.

Me humbler Scenes delight, and calmer Days;
  A tranquil Life fair Poverty secure!
Then boast, my Hearth, a small but cheerful Blaze,
  And Riches grasp who will, let me be poor.

Nor yet be Hope a Stranger to my Door,
  But o'er my Roof, bright Goddess, still preside!
With many a bounteous Autumn heap my Floor,
  And swell my Vats with Must, a purple Tide.

My tender Vines I'll plant with early Care,
  And choicest Apples, with a skilful Hand;
Nor blush, a Rustic, oft to guide the Share,
  Or goad the tardy Ox along the Land.

Let me, a simple Swain, with honest Pride,
  If chance a Lambkin from its Dam should roam,
Or sportful Kid, the little Wanderer chide,
  And in my Bosom bear exulting Home.

A Sound Appalling

2011-12-14T09:20:00.004-06:00

Robert Bridges (1844-1930), Shorter Poems, IV, 12, in his Poetical Works, Vol. II (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1899), p. 138:

The hill pines were sighing,
O'ercast and chill was the day:
A mist in the valley lying
Blotted the pleasant May.

But deep in the glen's bosom
Summer slept in the fire
Of the odorous gorse-blossom
And the hot scent of the brier.

A ribald cuckoo clamoured,
And out of the copse the stroke
Of the iron axe that hammered
The iron heart of the oak.

Anon a sound appalling,
As a hundred years of pride
Crashed, in the silence falling;
And the shadowy pine-trees sighed.

Darius Kinsey, Bucker Crosscutting Fallen Spruce
Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Study Tips

2011-12-14T08:09:00.003-06:00

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898, also known as Lewis Carroll), letter to Edith Rix:

When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it, stop, you will only hurt yourself by going on. Put it aside till the next morning; and if then you can’t make it out, and have no one to explain it to you, put it aside entirely, and go back to that part of the subject which you do understand. When I was reading Mathematics for University honours, I would sometimes, after working a week or two at some new book, and mastering ten or twenty pages, get into a hopeless muddle, and find it just as bad the next morning. My rule was to begin the book again. And perhaps in another fortnight I had come to the old difficulty with impetus enough to get over it. Or perhaps not. I have several books that I have begun over and over again.

My second hint shall be—Never leave an unsolved difficulty behind. I mean, don’t go any further in that book till the difficulty is conquered. In this point, Mathematics differs entirely from most other subjects. Suppose you are reading an Italian book, and come to a hopelessly obscure sentence—don’t waste too much time on it, skip it, and go on; you will do very well without it. But if you skip a mathematical difficulty, it is sure to crop up again: you will find some other proof depending on it, and you will only get deeper and deeper into the mud.

My third hint is, only go on working so long as the brain is quite clear. The moment you feel the ideas getting confused leave off and rest, or your penalty will be that you will never learn Mathematics at all!

George Clausen (1852-1944),
Twilight Interior
(Reading by Lamplight)

Fine Old Leisure

2011-12-13T05:14:00.003-06:00

George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), chapter LII:

Leisure is gone—gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow waggons, and the pedlars who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement: prone to excursion-trains, art-museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels: prone even to scientific theorising, and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage: he only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion,—of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis: happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall, and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of week-day services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon, if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing,—liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broadbacked like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port-wine,—not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations. Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure: he fingered the guineas in his pocket, and ate his dinners, and slept the sleep of the irresponsible; for had he not kept up his charter by going to church on the Sunday afternoons?

Fine old Leisure! Do not be severe upon him, and judge him by our modern standard: he never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the Times or Sartor Resartus.

Édouard Manet, Le Bon Bock (1873)

A Great Achievement of Culinary Art

2011-12-13T04:51:00.005-06:00

George Gissing (1857-1903), The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Winter, X):

Talking of vegetables: can the inhabited globe offer anything to vie with the English potato justly steamed? I do not say that it is always—or often—to be seen on our tables, for the steaming of a potato is one of the great achievements of culinary art; but when it is set before you, how flesh and spirit exalt! A modest palate will find more than simple comfort in your boiled potato of every day, as served in the decent household. New or old, it is beyond challenge delectable. Try to think that civilized nations exist to whom this food is unknown—nay, who speak of it, on hearsay, with contempt! Such critics, little as they suspect it, never ate a potato in their lives. What they have swallowed under that name was the vegetable with all its exquisite characteristics vulgarized or destroyed. Picture the "ball of flour" (as old-fashioned housewives call it) lying in the dish, diffusing the softest, subtlest aroma, ready to crumble, all but to melt, as soon as it is touched; recall its gust and its after-gust, blending so consummately with that of the joint, hot or cold. Then think of the same potato cooked in any other way, and what sadness will come upon you!

Charles Spencelayh, Dig for Victory:
The Wise Eat More Potatoes
Related post: A Blessed Thing.

Pope's Nose

2011-12-12T07:15:00.001-06:00

William Shenstone, Works in Verse and Prose (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1764), vol. II, p. 174:

People in high or in distinguished life ought to have a greater circumspection in regard to their most trivial actions. For instance, I saw M. Pope—and what was he doing when you saw him?—why to the best of my memory, he was picking his nose.

Winter Fields

2011-12-12T06:50:00.003-06:00

John Clare (1793-1864), Winter Fields:

O for a pleasant book to cheat the sway
Of winter—where rich mirth with hearty laugh
Listens and rubs his legs on corner seat
For fields are mire and sludge—and badly off
Are those who on their pudgy paths delay 5
There striding shepherd seeking driest way
Fearing nights wetshod feet and hacking cough
That keeps him waken till the peep of day
Goes shouldering onward and with ready hook
Progs oft to ford the sloughs that nearly meet 10
Accross the lands—croodling and thin to view
His loath dog follows—stops and quakes and looks
For better roads—till whistled to pursue
Then on with frequent jump he hirkles through

5 pudgy: muddy, like a puddle
10 progs: prods, probes
11 croodling: crouching
14 hirkles: cowers, shudders (or hurtles?)

Thanks to Charles Collicutt, who writes about hirkle:

I found another gloss in "The Poems of William Dunbar", which is available on Google Books here: http://tinyurl.com/8yhhhvd

To hirkle, hurkle, v. n. To draw the body together, to be in a rickety state, to be contracted into folds (Jamieson). Dr. Gregor says: to hirkle = to bend and totter. The form of the word in Banffshire is hurkle, to walk with a tottering step in a crouching position.

A Word about Bookstalls

2011-12-11T08:26:00.003-06:00

Salad for the Solitary. By an Epicure [Frederick Saunders] (New York: Lamport, Blakeman & Law, 1853), pp. 301-302:

A word about bookstalls—establishments which, humble in themselves, have been the resort in past days of many a true son of genius. Our collective literary spoils are not exclusively to be found garnishing the shelves of the library, or the bookseller’s store; there are sundry other interesting little nooks and corners in the wide world as attractive to the real book-worm as the honeypot to bees, where learned personages seek their literary aliment, and with as eager an appetite.

Book-stalls were the cheap literature of a former age. Ben Jonson was probably a haunter of them when a working brick-layer, he used to be seen with a trowel in one hand and a book in the other. Lackington was a constant frequenter of these lowly depositories of literary wares. The amusing anecdote of his book versus a leg of mutton, which his spouse commissioned him to purchase, his process of reasoning the matter, and final decision in favor of the food intellectual, reveals the first glimpses of his character. Charles Lamb relates a somewhat similar story of his purchase of a folio, "Beaumont and Fletcher," at a bookstall. He had marked it longingly, but was delayed by want of money. He almost daily passed the place to see if the book was there, fearful lest it should be gone. At length, late one Saturday night, having mastered the necessary sum—thirteen shillings—off he set to the shop, never dreaming of the possibility of its being shut. Finding this the case, and the worthy proprietor gone to his nocturnal repose, he was not yet, however, to be baulked of his prey, for he presently commenced a rapping at the door, sufficient to have awakened the seven sleepers. The bookseller came out, at length, in the direst alarm, half-clad, and grumblingly took the thirteen pieces of silver in exchange for the twin dramatists, whom the delighted author carried away in high exultation and rapture.

Cornelis Springer (1817-1891), Bookstall
Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

She Smiles for Few

2011-12-11T08:03:00.003-06:00

George Crabbe (1754-1832), The Village 1.136-139:

Where Plenty smiles—alas! she smiles for few—
And those who taste not, yet behold her store,
Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore,
The wealth around them makes them doubly poor.

Modern Students

2011-12-10T04:44:00.004-06:00

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994; rpt. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1995), p. 19, describing his experience teaching Henry James' story Brooksmith to undergraduate students in 1992:

And what emerged was this: that they were not, with a few exceptions, readers—never had been; that they had always occupied themselves with music, TV, and videos; that they had difficulty slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density; that they had problems with what they thought of as archaic diction, with allusions, with vocabulary that seemed "pretentious"; that they were especially uncomfortable with indirect or interior passages, indeed with any deviations from straight plot; and that they were put off by an ironic tone, because it flaunted superiority and made them feel they were missing something. The list is partial.

Manichean Avoidance of Arboricide

2011-12-10T03:56:00.005-06:00

The Cologne Mani Codex (P. Colon. inv. nr. 4780) "Concerning the Origin of His Body", tr. Ron Cameron and Arthur J. Dewey (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979), p. 11 (translating 7.2-4):

"If you keep the [pain] away from us (trees), (4) you will [not perish] with the murderer."

Id., p. 13 (translating 10.1-11):

...[it] wasted away, [wailing] like human beings, (4) and, as it were, like children. Alas! Alas! The blood was streaming down from the place cut by the pruning hook which (8) he held in his hands. And they were crying out in a human voice on account of their blows.

Id., p. 79 (translating 98.8-99.8):

Again he (Mani) points out that a date-palm tree spoke with Aianos, the Baptist from Koche, (12) and commanded him to say to <its> lord: "Don't cut (me) down because (16) my fruit is stolen, but grant me this [year]. And in [the] course of this year I shall give you (20) [fruit] proportionate to what has been stolen, [and in all] the [other years hereafter]." (99.1) But [it] also commanded (him) to say to that man who was stealing its fruit: (4) "Do not come at this season to steal my fruit away. If you come, I shall hurl you down (8) from my height and you will die."

I'm too lazy to transcribe the Greek text, which appears on the even-numbered pages in Cameron and Dewey, facing the English translation on the odd-numbered pages.

Ludwig Koenen, "Augustine and Manichaeism in Light of the Cologne Mani Codex," Illinois Classical Studies 3 (1978) 154-195 (176-187 on "Jesus Patibilis and Crux Lucis"), explains the theological basis for Manichean reluctance to injure plants and trees (at 176):

Manichean myths describe how particles of the divine Light, Augustine's substantia vitalis, fell to the earth and were tied up and kept captive in plants and trees.

Albert Henrichs, "'Thou Shalt Not Kill a Tree': Greek, Manichaean and Indian Tales," Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 16 (1979) 85-108 (at 97-103), attributes this belief to Indian influences.

In the Latin-speaking world, at least, Manicheans buttressed their belief by an idiosyncratic translation and interpretation of Paul, Galatians 3.13 (who quotes Deuteronomy 21.23):

Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.

Χριστὸς ἡμᾶς ἐξηγόρασεν ἐκ τῆς κατάρας τοῦ νόμου γενόμενος ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν κατάρα, ὅτι γέγραπται, Ἐπικατάρατος πᾶς ὁ κρεμάμενος ἐπὶ ξύλου.

The Manicheans seem to have translated πᾶς ὁ κρεμάμενος ἐπὶ ξύλου not, as one might expect, as omnis suspensus ex ligno, but rather as omni suspensus ex ligno (preserved in Augustine, Against Faustus 20.2). As Koenen points out (p. 179), "By the omission of one letter in the Latin text, the sentence taken from Paul and Deuteronomy came to express the sufferings of Christ in every tree and plant."

If there were such a thing as a Manichean translation of Galatians 3.13 into English, it might read something like this: "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is he that hangeth on every tree."

Augustine often poured scorn on his former co-religionists, the followers of Mani, for this belief, e.g. On the Way of Life of the Manicheans 17.55 (tr. Donald A. Gallagher and Idella J. Gallagher):

However, lest someday, when you come to realize how these passages contradict your teachings, you should decide to say the same thing about them, I shall keep to my original plan and ask you, first of all — you who are so full of promises of evidence and truth — what harm is done to a tree if you pull it up? I do not mean if you pluck some leaves or fruit from it, although one would undoubtedly be condemned by you as a corrupter of the symbol if he did this intentionally and not accidentally, but if you tore it up roots and all. For the soul which exists in a tree, and which you consider to be rational, is freed from bondage when the tree is cut down — a bondage in which it suffered much affliction, but all to no avail. It is well known that you and, in fact, the founder of your sect himself, used to threaten as a serious punishment, if not the worst, the turning of a man into a tree. But can the soul of a tree become wiser as does the soul of a man?

Cf. also Augustine, Confessions 3.10.18 (tr. Henry Chadwick):

Gradually and unconsciously I was led to the absurd trivialities of believing that a fig weeps when it is picked, and that the fig tree its mother sheds milky tears.

Elysium

2011-12-09T04:00:00.004-06:00

Thanks to Eric Thomson for what follows.

Arthur Ransome's 'Bohemia in London' is a fine evocation of literary London, Johnson's mainly but also Lamb's. Chapter IX is devoted to bookshops.

'Bohemia in London' (London, Stephen Swift and Co., 1912), pp. 138-40:

Summer and winter, book-buyers range up and down the street; book-buyers who mean to buy, book-buyers who would buy if they could, and book-buyers who have bought, and are now tormenting themselves by looking for bargains that they might have made, choicer than those they have already clinched. There is a rare joy in picking books from the stalls without the interference of any commercial fingers; a great content in turning over the pages of a book, a Cervantes perhaps, or a Boccaccio, or one of the eighteenth-century humourists, catching sight here and there of a remembered smile, and chuckling anew at the remembrance, putting the book down again, rather hurriedly, as if to decide once for all that you must not buy it, and then picking up another and repeating the performance. And then, the poignant, painful self-abandon when at last you are conquered, and a book leads you by the hand to the passionless little man inside the shop, and makes you pay him money, the symbol, mean, base, sordid in itself, but still the symbol, that the book has won, and swayed the pendulum of your emotions past the paying point.

I remember the buying of my "Anatomy of Melancholy" (that I have never read, nor ever mean to—I dare not risk the sweetness of the title); two big beautiful volumes, with a paper label on the back of each, they stood imperious on the shelves. I had seven-and-sixpence in the world, and was on my way up to Soho for dinner. I took one volume down, and turned the thick old leaves, and ran my eye over the black print, broken and patterned by quotations in italics, Latin quotations everywhere making the book a mosaic in two languages. To sit and smoke in front of such a book would be elysium. I could, of course, have got a copy at a library but then I did not want to read it. I wanted to own it, to sit in front of it with a devotional mind, to let my tobacco smoke be its incense, to worship its magnificent name; and here it was in such a dress as kings and hierarchs among books should wear. If I were ever to have a Burton, this Burton would I have. I remember I laid the book down, and stoically lit a pipe, before daring to look at the flyleaf for the pencilled price. Just then another man, one with the air of riches, walked casually up to the stall, and, fearful for my prize and yet timorous of its cost, I seized it and turned with trembling fingers back to the beginning:

"Two vols. 8/-."
I am glad to say I later took that risk.

Turning my purse inside out, I went in, with the two volumes and the three half-crowns, to come to some agreement with the bookseller. He let me have the books, but dinner vanished for that night, as the meats from the table of Halfdan the Black, and I had to walk to Chelsea. But what a joyous walk that was in the early autumn evening! Those two heavy volumes, one under each arm, swung me up the hill from Piccadilly as if they had been magic wings. The feel of them on my sides sent my heart beating and my face into smiles. One of the volumes was uncut—UNCUT. My landlord met me at the door with my bill. "The Devil!" my heart said; "I will attend to it," uttered my lips; and upstairs, penniless, by the light of a candle, that is, after all, as Elia has it, "a kindlier luminary than sun or moon," I spent three hours cutting that volume, leaf by leaf, happier than can well be told.

John Frederick Peto (1854-1907), Take Your Choice