Laudator Temporis Acti

Anatole France (1844-1924), The Garden of Epicurus, tr. Alfred Allinson (London: John Lane, 1920), p. 37:

For my part, I greatly enjoy certain books that breathe a calm and contented disconsolateness, such as Cervantes' incomparable romance, or Candide,—works which are, if rightly regarded, manuals of tolerance and indulgent pity, holy bibles of benignity.

The French, from Le Jardin d'Épicure, 9th ed. (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1895), pp. 39-40:

Je goûte beaucoup pour ma part quelques livres d'une sereine et riante désolation, comme cet incomparable Don Quichotte ou comme Candide, qui sont, à les bien prendre, des manuels d'indulgence et de pitié, des bibles de bienveillance.

J. Linderski, "Transitus. Official Travel Under the Sign of the Obelus," Philologus 143 (1999) 288-299 (at 288), rpt. in Roman Questions II. Selected Papers (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), pp. 307-318 (at 307):

To philologians corruptelae are like dragons. Those who slay them may gain a place in the text or a mention in the apparatus. Most often the dragon wins, the crux remains, ready for the next victim. Win or lose, we descend to the field to attack an obelus.

Richard Wünsch (1869-1915) first used the terms apopompē (ἀποπομπή) and epipompē (ἐπιπομπή) to describe two different ways of banishing evil. See his "Zur Geisterbannung im Altertum," Festschrift zur Jahrhundertfeier der Universität zu Breslau = Mitteilungen der Schlesischen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde 13/14 (1911) 9-32. Wünsch used apopompē to mean simply driving away evil, epipompē to mean driving away evil onto someone or something else or to some other specific location. A classic example of epipompē can be found in the Gospels (Matthew 8.30-32, Mark 5.11-13, Luke 8.32-33), when Jesus, in performing an exorcism, drove demons into a herd of pigs. All other exorcisms in the Gospels are examples of apopompē.

Frank R. Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization c. 370-529 (Leiden: Brill, 1993; rpt. 2001), p. 132, translates an interesting 6th century exorcism of hail found on a marble plaque from the district of Philadelphia in Lycia. I would classify it as an example of apopompē, because the hail is told just to get out of town, not told to go to some specific place:

Exorcism for the turning back of hail. I adjure you, O daimon, who presides over the suddenly turbulent air, when you thunder and cause lightning flashes and send hail out from the sky! I adjure you, O daimon, in the name of the egg of a male-begotten bird! I adjure you, the furnace-mouthed daimon, go outside the horoi of the village of Ennaton! I adjure you by the power of the God of Hosts and of the throne of the Lord, go outside the horoi! I adjure you ... by the elder and the younger, go outside the horoi of the village of Ennaton! I adjure you by Ouphridiel and ...! I adjure you by the letters of the planets, alpha, epsilon, eta, iota, omicron, upsilon, and omega, go outside the horoi of the village of Ennaton! You archangels Raphael, Ragouel, Istrael, Agathoel, make a seal around ... the village of Ennaton.

I think the most recent edition of the Greek is in Georg Petzl, Tituli Asiae minoris, Vol. 5: Tituli Lydiae linguis Graeca et Latina conscripti, Fasc. 3: Philadelpheia et ager philadelphenus (Wien: Verl. d. Österr. Akad. d. Wiss., 2007), pp. 166 ff., but the book is unavailable to me. Here is an image of the Greek from Henri Grégoire, Recueil des inscriptions grecques-chrétiennes d'Asie mineure (Paris: E. Leroux, 1922), p. 124:


A similar exorcism, with the characteristic features of epipompē however, appears in Francisco Javier Fernández Nieto, "A Visigothic Charm from Asturias and the Classical Tradition of Phylacteries against Hail," in Richard L. Gordon and ‎Francisco Marco Simón, edd., Magical Practice in the Latin West: Papers from the International Conference held at the University of Zaragoza, 30 Sept.-1 Oct. 2005 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 551-600 (at 568-569, translating a Byzantine exorcism of hail of unknown provenance, with footnote):

Exorcism of hail: a black cloud rose up from Bethlehem full of hail with thunder and lightning, and it was met by an archangel of the host of God, who said: where are you going, black cloud full of hail with thunder and lightning? It answered: I am going to the fields in (such-and-such a place) which are planted with vines to dry up the orchards, ruin the trees and their buds, and spoil the fruits and cause all types of damage. The archangel of the host of God said: I entreat you through God invisible, the creator of the heaven, earth and sea and everything that therein is. I entreat you before the four pillars that hold the unmovable throne of God and before the river of fire, do not try to go to the pieces of land in (such-and-such a place), and instead go to the wild mountains where no cock crows, no semantron⁴⁵ sounds or is heard for the glory of the great God in heaven. Amen.

⁴⁵ In Byzantine texts, the term σημαντήριον (σήμαντρον) denotes the semantron, the bar-gong used in Orthodox churches, cf. Longo 1989, 69.

An image of the Greek (id., p. 568):


Finally, another example of epipompē, by Maffeo Barberini (1568-1644), aka Pope Urban VIII, hymn in honor of Saint Martina, Virgin and Martyr (January 30), stanza 7, tr. Joseph Connelly in Hymns of the Roman Liturgy (London: Longmans, 1957), p. 172:

Protect your native land and give all Christian nations the respite of true peace. Banish the tumult of arms and the savagery of wars into far-distant lands.

The Latin (id.):

Tu natale solum protege, tu bonae
Da pacis requiem Christiadum plagis;
Armorum strepitus et fera proelia
    In fines age Thracios.

The Latin is more geographically specific than Connelly's translation would lead one to believe. Instead of "far-distant lands," a more literal translation is "the boundaries of Thrace."

More examples of epipompē here.

Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696), "De la mode," Les caractères, ou, Les moeurs de ce siècle (tr. Helen Stott):

Some people have such an eager thirst for knowledge that they cannot bear to be ignorant of anything. They dip into everything and master nothing; they prefer to learn much rather than learn well, to be superficial and weak in many sciences rather than to be deeply versed in one. Thus they find that on every subject there is someone who excels them and can correct them; they are mere dupes of their own vain curiosity, and can only after long and painful efforts overcome their gross ignorance.

Others possess the keys of all learning, yet never use them. They spend their lives in puzzling out all the known languages, and even would discover that which is spoken in the moon. The most useless idioms, the most ridiculous and mystical characters, are precisely those which awake their passion for languages and excite their industry. They pity those who are contented to know their own language, or at most, Greek and Latin. Such people read all books of history and yet know nothing at all of history; they skim through so many books that they profit by none; they could not well be more barren of facts and principles, but they certainly have the best collection of words and phrases which can be imagined; their memories are oppressed and loaded with them, while their minds remain empty.

In French:

Quelques-uns par une intempérance de savoir, et par ne pouvoir se résoudre à renoncer à aucune sorte de connaissance, les embrassent toutes et n'en possèdent aucune: ils aiment mieux savoir beaucoup que de savoir bien, et être faibles et superficiels dans diverses sciences que d'être sûrs et profonds dans une seule. Ils trouvent en toutes rencontres celui qui est leur maître et qui les redresse; ils sont les dupes de leur curiosité, et ne peuvent au plus, par de longs et pénibles efforts, que se tirer d'une ignorance crasse.

D'autres ont la clef des sciences, où ils n'entrent jamais: ils passent leur vie à déchiffrer les langues orientales et les langues du nord, celles des deux Indes, celles des deux pôles, et celle qui se parle dans la lune. Les idiomes les plus inutiles, avec les caractères les plus bizarres et les plus magiques, sont précisément ce qui réveille leur passion et qui excite leur travail; ils plaignent ceux qui se bornent ingénument à savoir leur langue, ou tout au plus la grecque et la latine. Ces gens lisent toutes les histoires et ignorent l'histoire; ils parcourent tous les livres, et ne profitent d'aucun; c'est en eux une stérilité de faits et de principes qui ne peut être grande, mais à la vérité la meilleur récolte et la richesse la plus abondante de mots et de paroles qui puisse s'imaginer: ils plient sous le faix; leur mémoire en est accablée, pendant que leur esprit demeure vide.

Evan Bleier, "Tennessee city will no longer put up with saggy pants," UPI (May 14, 2014):

The City Council of Pikeville unanimously approved an ordinance that would make individuals who wear their pants "more than three inches below the top of the hips (crest of the ilium)" guilty of public indecency.

This is neither a new nor a local phenomenon. See Marcel Pagnol (1895-1874), Manon of the Springs, chapter 15 (tr. W.E. van Heyningen; ellipsis in original):

"You poor simpleton!" cried the Papet. "Just look at the rich—they always have their trousers well supported, whereas peasants, with their woollen belts, the backsides of their trousers hang down to their knees..."

Related posts:

• Droopy Drawers
• More on Droopy Drawers

This post is a supplement to Dedications of Trees to Gods.

---

H.S. Versnel, Coping with the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2011 = Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, 173), p. 120, with footnote:

An early 5th-century inscription from a Nymph grotto at Pharsalos (Thessalia) records that a certain Pantalkes “has dedicated to the goddesses the tree (?) (and) the laurel” (Παντάλκης ἀνέθεκε τὸ δέ[νδρον] τὰν δὲ δάφ[ναν] ἇ[ι] ἑδ’ ἀπ’ ἀέ[θλον] Φάν[ι]π[πος).<sup>353

353</sup> I give the text as in Himmelmann-Wildschütz 1957, 28, where SEG 1.247 is rather more reticent with respect to conjecture. Most recent edition of this inscription and the one following: J.-Cl. Decourt, Études épigraphiques 3. Inscriptions de Thessalie 1: Les cités de la vallée de l’Enipeus (Athens 1995), 88–90, nos. 72 and 73. He reads: Παντάλκης ἀνέθεκε τόδ’ ἔργον. Τὰν δὲ δάφ[ναν] ἄερ ἅπαξ ΕΦΑΝΠ. See discussions in Himmelmann-Wildschütz; Versnel 1981a, 79; Pleket ibid. 162. Full translation in Connor 1988, 162 f. Texts and discussion also in Purvis 2003, 17 f., with n. 23. We cannot be sure about the ‘tree’ and the ‘daphne’. However, the emphasis on trees, plants and gardening is remarkable in these private cults, as also noticed by M.P.J. Dillon, The Ecology of the Greek Sanctuary, ZPE 118 (1997) 113–127, espec. 119 f. One might say that both these ‘hermits’ created their own ‘sacred grove’. Sacred groves are marked as places of purity and bliss outside urban civilisation where the human meets the divine, as F. Graf argues in: Bois sacrés et oracles en Asie Mineure, in: O. de Cazaneuve & J. Scheid (edd.), Les bois sacrés. Actes du Colloque international Centre J. Bérard (Naples 1993) 23–29. On the phenomenon of the sacred grove in general: G. Rüpke, Kulte jenseits der Polisreligion: Polemiken und Perspektiven, JAuC 47 (2004) 5–15, espec. 9–12. On such groves in Greek regions with a collection of epigraphic testimonia see: G. Ragone, in: C. Albore Livadie & F. Ortolani (edd.), La sistema uomo-ambiente tra passato e presente (Bari 1998) 11–22; cf. J. Mylonopoulos, Natur als Heiligtum—Natur im Heiligtum, ARG 10 (2008) 51–83, espec. 60–65, with more literature. Full treatment: M. Horster, Landbesitz griechischer Heiligtümer in archaischer und klassischer Zeit (Berlin – New York 2004) 92–138. On utopian aspects of gardens see: A.L. Giesecke, The Epic City. Urbanism, Utopia, and the Garden in Ancient Greece and Rome (Washington DC. 2007). Angelos Chaniotis sent me a photo of a wooden table fixed at a eucalyptus tree somewhere in Crete with the text: ΤΑ ΔΕΔΡΑ 7 ΕΥΚΑΠ [. . .], ΤΑ ΑΝΘΗ, ΤΗ ΒΡΥΣΗ ΚΑΙ ΤΟ ΕΡΓΟ ΠΡΟΣΤΑΣΙΑΣ, ΤΑ ΧΑΡΙΖΩ ΣΤΗΣ ΠΑΝΑΓΙΑΣ ΤΗ ΧΑΡΗ (“the seven eucalyptus trees, the flowers, the well, and the work of supervision, I give in gratitude to the Panaghia” [then follows the name of the giver]).

Versnel (id., pp. 18-20) answers critics who complain that the footnotes in his books are too many and too long. I wish they were even more numerous and longer.

Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; rpt. 1995), p. 108 (footnote omitted):

It is very difficult for Westerners, especially Americans, to apprehend how significant poetry can be as an expressive mechanism in society. For many of us poetry has connotations of elitism, obscurity, impracticality. Few of us read poetry, and fewer still have a real appreciation of it. But in Vietnam this is not the case. Many Vietnamese read poetry with enjoyment, commit it to memory, and recite poems to each other with unfeigned enthusiasm. Everyday speech is liberally sprinkled with poetic allusions. Even the poor and the illiterate imbibe deeply of a rich oral tradition that has incorporated much that originated in the written literature of the educated elite. Poetry has been and remains much more popular and important in Vietnam than in the United States.

Hat tip: Jim K., who pointed me to the quotation in Morris Berman, "Thoughts on a Rainy Day."

Tu Fu (712-770), "On the Spur of the Moment," tr. Burton Watson in The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 232 (with translator's footnote):

River slopes, already into the midmonth of spring,
under the blossoms, bright mornings again:
I look up, eager to watch the birds;
turn my head, answering what I took for a call.
Reading books, I skip the difficult parts;
faced with wine, I keep my cup filled.
These days I've gotten to know the old man of O-mei;¹
he understands this idleness that is my true nature.

1. O-mei is a famous mountain southwest of Ch'eng-tu.

The same, tr. David Hinton in The Selected Poems of Tu Fu (New York: New Directions, 1989), p. 62:

Already mid-spring on the riverside,
Sunrise opens beneath the blossoms again.
Hoping to see the bird, I look up. And
Turning away, I answer . . . no one there.

I read, skipping over hard parts easily,
Pour wine from full jars. . . . The old
Sage on O-mei is a new friend.
It is here, in idleness, I become real.

The same, tr. Edna Worthley Underwood and Chi Hwang Chu in Tu Fu: Wanderer and Minstrel Under Moons of Cathay (Portland: Mosher Press, 1929), p. 92:

On this river-bank Middle Spring has come.
Under trees in flower at the morning's prime
I can lean to look at the swinging birds.
I lie to the man who asks my health.

I read. I skip unfamiliar words.
I face wine and I fill my cup to the brim.
'Tis not long since I met Hermit O Mei.
He knows the truth—just how lazy I am.

J.N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982; rpt. 1993), has an appendix on the Vocabulary Relating to Bodily Functions (pp. 231-250). One of the bodily functions discussed is farting (pp. 249-250). In his discussion Adams doesn't mention a fragment of Plautus (fab. inc. 62 Goetz) preserved by Macrobius, Saturnalia 5.19.11:

me<di>cum habet patagus morbus aes.

medicum Bücheler: mecum ω
patagus Canter (pet- A): p(a)eagus ω

Robert A. Kaster, in his Loeb Classical Library edition of Macrobius, Saturnalia, Vol. II: Books 3-5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 439, translates the fragment thus (with footnote on p. 438):

The disease of flatulence⁷⁹ is healed by bronze.

⁷⁹ Plautus' patagus = Gk. patagos, which denotes a range of harsh sounds, including the clatter of arms, the crash of thunder, and the rumbling of flatulence (LSJ⁹ s.v.).

For the meaning "rumbling caused by flatulence" Liddell-Scott-Jones s.v. πάταγος cite HP.VM22, i.e. Hippocrates, On Ancient Medicine 22.7 (tr. Mark J. Schiefsky):

All that produces wind and flatulent colic in the body is apt to bring about noise and rumbling in the hollow and spacious parts such as the belly and the chest: for if the wind does not fill up a part so as to come to rest, but is able to shift its place and move about, this necessarily gives rise to both noise and evident movements.

ὅσα δὲ φῦσάν τε καὶ ἀνειλήματα ἀπεργάζεται ἐν τῷ σώματι, προσήκει ἐν μὲν τοῖσι κοίλοισι καὶ εὐρυχωώρέσιν, οἷον κοιλίῃ τε καὶ θώρηκι, ψόφον τε καὶ πάταγον ἐμποιεῖν· ὅ τι γὰρ ἂν μὴ ἀποπληρώσῃ οὕτως ὥστε στῆναι ἀλλ’ ἔχῃ μεταβολάς τε καὶ κινήσιας, ἀνάγκη ὑπ’ αὐτῶν ψόφον καὶ καταφανέας κινήσιας γίνεσθαι.

Lewis and Short define patagus as simply "a sort of disease." In the quotation from Plautus, aes perhaps means copper rather than bronze. Copper was an ingredient in ancient medical prescriptions, although not (so far as I know) as a remedy for flatulence. A slightly more literal translation of the fragment from Plautus might be:

Flatulence, a disease, has copper as a physician.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

[Plato], Alcibiades I 118B (tr. W.R.M. Lamb):

You are wedded to stupidity, my fine friend, of the vilest kind; you are impeached of this by your own words, out of your own mouth; and this, it seems, is why you dash into politics before you have been educated. And you are not alone in this plight, but you share it with most of those who manage our city's affairs...

ἀμαθίᾳ γὰρ συνοικεῖς, ὦ βέλτιστε, τῇ ἐσχάτῃ, ὡς ὁ λόγος σου κατηγορεῖ καὶ σὺ σαυτοῦ· διὸ καὶ ᾁττεις ἄρα πρὸς τὰ πολιτικὰ πρὶν παιδευθῆναι. πέπονθας δὲ τοῦτο οὐ σὺ μόνος, ἀλλὰ καὶ οἱ πολλοὶ τῶν πραττόντων τὰ τῆσδε τῆς πόλεως...

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), "The King of Beasts," The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Vol. 3: 1939-1962, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 138:

Cattle in the slaughter-pens, laboratory dogs
Slowly tortured to death, flogged horses, trapped fur-bearers,
Agonies in the snow, splintering your needle teeth on chill steel,—look:
Mankind, your Satans, are not very happy either. I wish you had seen the battle-squalor, the bombings,
The screaming fire-deaths. I wish you could watch the endless hunger, the cold, the moaning, the hopelessness.
I wish you could smell the Russian and the German torture-camps. It is quite natural the two-footed beast
That inflicts terror, the cage, enslavement, torment and death on all other animals
Should eat the dough that he mixes and drink the death-cup. It is just and decent. And it will increase, I think.

Related posts:

• The Most Perfect of the Beasts of Prey
• How Peaceful It Would Be
• Outbreak
• Homo ferox
• The Enemy of All
• Homo sapiens
• The Smell of Humanity
• Beware

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, "Fraenkel, Eduard David Mortier (1888–1970)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

He lectured effectively on Catullus, Virgil, and Horace; but he exerted special influence through his famous seminars on Aeschylus's Agamemnon, in which he went through the play in almost as much time as it took Agamemnon to capture Troy.

Aeschylus' Agamemnon has 1673 lines; it took Agamemnon ten years to capture Troy.

---

Update from Dr. Christopher Stray:

Re yr post on Fraenkel, quoting the late Hugh Lloyd-Jones, let me offer you this, from an unpublished text:

In his ODNB article on Fraenkel, Hugh Lloyd-Jones repeated what was doubtless a contemporary witticism in remarking that in the seminar, Fraenkel ‘went through the play in almost as much time as it took Agamemnon to capture Troy’ (Lloyd-Jones 2004). There were eight weekly seminars (Fridays, 5-7pm) for two terms each year, a total of 192 hours. The average speed with which the text was read and discussed was thus just under ten lines per hour.

Related post: Reading Quickly or Slowly.

Fedwa Wazwaz, An Invitation to Grow Together," Minneapolis Star Tribune (May 17, 2013), quotes Goethe as follows:

Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.

This quotation can be found elsewhere on the Internet. When I read it, my bullshit detector sounded an alarm. Did Goethe really say something so much like New Age claptrap? My suspicion increased when, looking deeper, I found the quotation in German on the Internet, as "Jeder will jemand sein, niemand will wachsen." To my admittedly untrained ear this had the ring of a translation from English back into German, not of an original statement by Goethe in German. I couldn't find this supposed quotation from Goethe anywhere in his printed works.

Then, thanks to a hint from a friend, I unearthed the quotation in The Viking Book of Aphorisms: A Personal Selection, edd. W.H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger (New York: Viking Press, 1962; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993), p. 52:

Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.

Here the quotation is attributed to Goethe, but with no indication of chapter and verse.

The closest approximation I could find in Goethe's works was this epigram in the Gesamtausgabe, Bd. I: Gedichte (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1949), p. 664 (from Xenien, Book IV):

Mit seltsamen Gebärden
Gibt man sich viele Pein,
Kein Mensch will etwas werden,
Ein jeder will schon was sein.

This, I think, means something like the following in English:

With a singular manner
One takes great suffering upon himself.
No one wants to become something,
Everyone wants to be something right now.

Philemon, fragment 105, Greek text in R. Kassel and C. Austin, edd., Poetae Comici Graeci, Vol. VII (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), p. 284 (my translation):

A most fitting possession for men is a farm;
For what nature asks, a farm provides with care:
Wheat, oil, wine, figs, honey.
Silver plate and purple dye are
Well suited for the stage, but not for life.

διακαιότατον κτῆμ' ἐστὶν άνθρώποις άγρός·
ὧν ἡ φύσις δεῖται γὰρ ἐπιμελῶς φέρει,
πυρούς, ἔλαιον, οἶνον, ἰσχάδας, μέλι.
τὰ δ' ἀργυρώματ' ἐστὶν ἥ τε πορφύρα
εἰς τοὺς τραγῳδοὺς εὔθετ', οὐκ εἰς τὸν βίον.

1 διακαιότατον: εὐκταιότατον Edmonds

Greek Anthology 11.67 (Macedonius the Consul, tr. W.R. Paton):

Memory and Oblivion, all hail! Memory I say in the case of good things, and Oblivion in the case of evil.

Μνήμη καὶ Λήθη, μέγα χαίρετον· ἡ μὲν ἐπ' ἔργοις
    Μνήμη τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς, ἡ δ' ἐπὶ λευγαλέοις.

Related post: Remembering and Forgetting.

Natasha Singer, "Never Forgetting a Face," New York Times (May 17, 2014), on Dr. Joseph J. Atick:

Eventually, he dropped out of high school to write a physics textbook. His family moved to Miami, and he decided to skip college. It did not prove a setback; at 17, he was accepted to a doctoral program in physics at Stanford.

Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), "My Winter-Garden," Miscellanies, Vol. I, 2nd ed. (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1860), pp. 134-163 (at 144-145):

Have you eyes to see? Then lie down on the grass, and look near enough to see something more of what is to be seen; and you will find tropic jungles in every square foot of turf; mountain cliffs and debacles at the mouth of every rabbit burrow: dark strids, tremendous cataracts, 'deep glooms and sudden glories,' in every foot-broad rill which wanders through the turf. All is there for you to see, if you will but rid yourself of 'that idol of space;' and nature, as every one will tell you who has seen dissected an insect under the microscope, as grand and graceful in her smallest as in her hugest forms.

Related posts:

• Whortleberries
• A Miniature Wilderness
• Enough for the Study of a Lifetime
• At My Own Doorstep
• Enough of Interest and Beauty
• Microcosms
• It Is All Here

Jane Austen (1775-1817), Mansfield Park, chapter I (Sir Thomas Bertram speaking):

[We] must prepare ourselves for gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions, and very distressing vulgarity of manner...

A quotation of wide application. It could be said, for example, by a teacher anticipating the first day of school, or by anyone facing an upcoming family reunion.

J. Linderski, review of Marianne Bonnefond-Coudry, Le Sénat de la république romaine de la guerre d'Hannibal à Auguste: Pratiques délibératives et prise de décision (Rome: École française de Rome, 1989), in American Journal of Philology 113.1 (Spring 1992) 125-128 (at 127-128), rpt. in Roman Questions II. Selected Papers (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), pp. 37-39 (at 39):

It is easy to carp. The blame rests not with the hand that wrote the book, but with the absurd academic system that rewards effuse scribbling and frowns upon concise lucidity. It is not by accident that Louis Robert had never written a thèse.

Eduard Fraenkel (1888-1970), "The Latin Studies of Hermann and Wilamowitz," Journal of Roman Studies 38 (1948) 28-34 (at 31):

Only those who equal Horace in philhellenism and insight into the nature of Greek poetry are in a position to understand the poet of Venusia and the Italic vigour of his Muse.

Id., p. 32:

But this article and many occasional remarks of his on Horace are overshadowed by the essay 'Horaz und die griechischen Lyriker', at the end of his book Sappho und Simonides. This brief chapter is a masterpiece, and from its twenty pages a student who reads them patiently and intelligently, and is capable of following up their laconic hints, will gain more for his understanding of Horace than by plodding through whole libraries of more voluminous works.

Hat tip: Karl Maurer.

J. Linderski, review of Elisabeth H. Erdmann, Die Rolle des Heeres in der Zeit von Marius bis Caesar: Militärische und politische Probleme einer Berufsarmee (Neustadt/Aisch: Druck und Verlag Ph. C.W. Schmidt, 1972), in American Classical Review 2 (1972) 216-217 (at 217), rpt. in Roman Questions II. Selected Papers (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), pp. 284-285 (at 285, with author's supplement in brackets):

Old German dissertations, while often narrow-minded and dull, were almost invariably very useful as they collected dispersed evidence or presented interesting solutions of particular problems. This apparently is no more in vogue. A pretence of sociological open-mindedness coupled with philological negligence is an excellent formula for producing a useless book. {Since these lines were composed the pest has spread far and wide producing vast libraries of hot air}.

Hans-Friedrich Mueller, "Doctus vir et perfectus magister," in C.F. Konrad, ed., Augusto Augurio: Rerum Humanarum Et Divinarum Commentationes in Honorem Jerzy Linderski (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004), pp. 1-4 (at 2):

We had at the beginning of the term been instructed to read the first five books of Livy in Latin, to consult always Ogilvie, that to read Latin without a commentary was an act of hubris (though, on the other hand, commentaries were not to be trusted implicitly, and usually failed when one turned to them with real questions; but then again, there was no such thing as a completely useless commentary), and to read another five books as well, but to choose whatever else was pleasing (later we were told to read Book Six along with others because they too were essential).

Joachim Du Bellay (1522-1560), Les Regrets, sonnet 68, tr. Richard Helgerson:

I hate the Florentine's usurious greed. I hate the crazy Sienese's lack of judgment. I hate the Genovese's rare truthfulness, and the Venetian's excessively sly malice.

I hate the Ferraran for I know not what vice. I hate all Lombards for disloyalty, the proud Neapolitan for his great vanity, and the lazy Roman for working so little.

I hate the unruly Englishman and the blustering Scot, the treacherous Burgundian and the gossipy Frenchman, the haughty Spaniard and the drunken German.

In short, I hate some vice in every nation. I even hate myself for my imperfection. But above all, I hate pedantic learning.

The same, tr. David R. Slavitt:

I hate the Florentines, usurious leeches;
I hate the Sienese, who are wild and crazy;
I hate the Genevans, whose notions of truth are hazy
at best, and Venetians, those cunning sons of bitches.

I hate Ferrarans, whose vices I can't even
imagine, and Lombards, who will always break
their promises, and Neapolitans, fake
arrogant peacocks...And Romans? That's a given!

The surly English and braggart Scots I despise.
Burgundians I hate for telling lies.
French yammer, Spaniards are vain, and the German drinks.

Each nation has its defect that wants correction.
And I hate myself for my own imperfection.
But what I hate worst is pedantry. That stinks.

The French, in modern spelling, from Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets précédé de Les Antiquités de Rome et suivi de La Défense et Illustration de la Langue française (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), pp. 113-114:

Je hais du Florentin l'usurière avarice,
Je hais du fol Siennois le sens mal arrêté,
Je hais du Genevois la rare vérité,
Et du Vénitien la trop caute malice:

Je hais le Ferrarais pour je ne sais quel vice,
Je hais tous les Lombards pour l'infidélité,
Le fier Napolitain pour sa grand' vanité,
Et le poltron romain pour son peu d'exercice:

Je hais l'Anglais mutin et le brave Écossais,
Le traître Bourguignon et l'indiscret Français,
Le superbe Espagnol et l'ivrogne Tudesque:

Bref, je hais quelque vice en chaque nation,
Je hais moi-même encor mon imperfection,
Mais je hais par sur tout un savoir pédantesque.

Related posts:

• Racial Antipathy
• National Characteristics
• Xenophobia
• Something to Offend Everyone
• The English Class System

J. Linderski, "Agnes Kirsopp Michels and the Religio," Classical Journal 92.4 (April-May 1997) 323-345 (at 328):

This youthful work shows all the hallmarks of a mature scholar: painstaking attention to detail, dogged hunt for facts, distrust of fancy theories, and independence of mind.

Id., p. 336, n. 31:

[B]efore we proceed to a literary or historical study we have first to know in the analyzed text the sense of every word, in all its applications and shades, a step all too often omitted.

Agnes Kirsopp Michels (1909-1993),
photograph by Bern Schwartz

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), "Orca," The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Vol. 3: 1939-1962, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 205-206 (at 206):

But the breed of man
Has been queer from the start. It looks like a botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped.

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), "Diogenes and Plato," Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans (London: Edward Moxon, 1853), pp. 73-131 (at 75; Diogenes speaking):

The bird of wisdom flies low, and seeks her food under hedges: the eagle himself would be starved if he always soared aloft and against the sun. The sweetest fruit grows near the ground, and the plants that bear it require ventilation and lopping. Were this not to be done in thy garden, every walk and alley, every plot and border, would be covered with runners and roots, with boughs and suckers. We want no poets or logicians or metaphysicians to govern us: we want practical men, honest men, continent men, unambitious men, fearful to solicit a trust, slow to accept, and resolute never to betray one.

Id., p. 93:

Keep always to the point, or with an eye upon it, and instead of saying things to make people stare and wonder, say what will withhold them hereafter from wondering and staring. This is philosophy; to make remote things tangible, common things extensively useful, useful things extensively common, and to leave the least necessary for the last. I have always a suspicion of sonorous sentences. The full shell sounds little, but shows by that little what is within. A bladder swells out more with wind than with oil.

Id., p. 97:

Why not at once introduce a new religion? since religions keep and are relished in proportion as they are salted with absurdity, inside and out; and all of them must have one great crystal of it for the centre; but Philosophy pines and dies unless she drinks limpid water.

Id., p. 100:

I want sense, not stars.

Id.:

The only thing I know about the soul is, that it makes the ground slippery under us when we discourse on it...

Id., p. 101:

Thou hast many admirers; but either they never have read thee, or do not understand thee, or are fond of fallacies, or are incapable of detecting them. I would rather hear the murmur of insects in the grass than the clatter and trilling of cymbals and timbrels over-head. The tiny animals I watch with composure, and guess their business: the brass awakes me only to weary me: I wish it under-ground again, and the parchment on the sheep's back.

ΠΕΡΙ ΔΕΙCΙΔΑΙΜΟΝΙΑC. Plutarchus, and Theophrastus, On Superstition; with Various Appendices, and a Life of Plutarchus (Kentish Town: Julian Hibbert, 1828), p. vi:

I terminate this my Preface by consigning all "Greek Scholars" to the special care of Beelzebul.

Thomas MacDonagh (1878-1916), "Requies," The Poetical Works of Thomas MacDonagh (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1916), p. 28:

He is dead, and never word of blame
    Or praise of him his spirit hears,
Sacred, secure from cark of fame,
    From sympathy of useless tears.

Euripides, Hippolytus 1328-1330 (Artemis speaking; tr. David Kovacs):

Among the gods the custom is this: no god will cross the will of another, but we all stand aside.

                         θεοῖσι δ' ὦδ' ἔχει νόμος·
οὐδεὶς ἀπαντᾶν βούλεται προθυμίᾳ
τῇ τοῦ θέλοντος, ἀλλ' ἀφιστάμεσθ' ἀεί.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), "Carmel Point," The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Vol. 3: 1939-1962, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 399:

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rock-heads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Ch'u Ch'uang I, "A Mountain Spring," tr. Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese: Love and the Turning Year (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 51:

There is a brook in the mountains,
Nobody I ask knows its name.
It shines on the earth like a piece
Of the sky. It falls away
In waterfalls, with a sound
Like rain. It twists between rocks
And makes deep pools. It divides
Into islands. It flows through
Calm reaches. It goes its way
With no one to mind it. The years
Go by, its clear depths never change.

Peter A. Boodberg (1903-1972), Cedules from a Berkeley Workshop in Asiatic Philology, 013: On Fishing Snow:

In this cedule I wish to confess to twenty years of academic treason: two decades of grudging admiration for the clumsy and sometimes pathetic, but always honest and sincere attempts of the late Florence Ayscough to metaphrase Chinese poetry verbatim. Her grasp of Chinese grammar may have been infirm and her enthusiasm for the graphic analysis of characters as unbridled as Ezra Pound's. Yet her scripts show recognition of a primary responsibility of a translator, the search for diction in some degree commensurate with that of the original; perhaps also a deeper respect for great poetry than is evident in the product of so many of us, staid academicians, who dismiss her efforts with an indulgent smile. Her work often betrays her innocent fallibility; ours, as often, unfaithfulness to our knowledge.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

John Addington Symonds (1840-1893), Studies of the Greek Poets: First Series, 2nd ed. (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1877), p. 249:

[H]e has the peculiar and private disability of never having been really appreciated at his worth except by a few scholars and enthusiastic poets. The reason for this want of intelligence in the case of Aristophanes is not hard to see. First of all, his plays are very difficult. Their allusions require much learned illustration. Their vocabulary is copious and rare. So that none but accomplished Grecians or devoted students of literature can hope to read him with much pleasure to themselves. In a translation his special excellence is almost unrecognizable. Next—and this is the real reason why Aristophanes has been unfairly dealt with, as well as the source of the second class of difficulties which meet his interpreters—it is hard for the modern Christian world to tolerate his freedom of speech and coarseness. Of all the Greeks, essentially a nude nation, he is the most naked—the most audacious in his revelation of all that human nature is supposed to seek to hide.

Id., p. 255:

It must be acknowledged that the Greeks were devoid of what we call shame and delicacy in respect of their bodies. It was only in the extreme old age of the Greek race, and under the dominion of Oriental mysticism, that the Alexandrian Plotinus was heard to exclaim that he blushed because he had a body. The true Greeks, on the contrary, were proud of the body, loved to display their physical perfections, felt no shame of any physical needs, were not degraded by the exercise of any animal function, nay poetized the pleasures of the flesh.

Peter A. Boodberg (1903-1972), Cedules from a Berkeley Workshop in Asiatic Philology, 019: Translations, Hyperbatic and Hyperbathetic:

A pedant I take to be: 'a self-disciplined and disciplinarian disseminator of painfully acquired knowledge to the young'. His decalogue begins: "Thou shalt not, without apology, attempt to avoid an issue which thou hast taught thy disciple to face squarely". Now, pedants who call themselves philologists have a short and simple confession of faith: 'Grammar = Order = Beauty'. This naive credo sustains them through endless hours of drudgery spent in scribbling palimpsestic paradigms, and serves them as a potent incantation for dispelling phantasmagorias conjured by the solecistic sprites who haunt them in the night.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), "Autumn Journal: XIII," Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1966; rpt. 1979), pp. 125-127:

Which things being so, as we said when we studied
    The classics, I ought to be glad
That I studied the classics at Marlborough and Merton,
    Not everyone here having had
The privilege of learning a language
    That is incontrovertibly dead,
And of carting a toy-box of hall-marked marmoreal phrases
    Around in his head.
We wrote compositions in Greek which they said was a lesson
    In logic and good for the brain;
We marched, counter-marched to the field-marshal'’s blue-pencil baton,
    We dressed by the right and we wrote out the sentence again.
We learned that a gentleman never misplaces his accents,
    That nobody knows how to speak, much less how to write
English who has not hob-nobbed with the great-grandparents of English,
    That the boy on the Modern Side is merely a parasite
But the classical student is bred to the purple, his training in syntax
    Is also a training in thought
And even in morals; if called to the bar or the barracks
    He always will do what he ought.
And knowledge, besides, should be prized for the sake of knowledge:
    Oxford crowded the mantlepiece with gods—
Scaliger, Heinsius, Dindorf, Bentley and Wilamowitz—
    As we learned our genuflexions for Honour Mods.
And then they taught us philosophy, logic and metaphysics,
    The Negative Judgement and the Ding an Sich,
And every single thinker was powerful as Napoleon
    And crafty as Metternich.
And it really was very attractive to be able to talk about tables
    And to ask if the table is,
And to draw the cork out of an old conundrum
    And watch the paradoxes fizz.
And it made one confident to think that nothing
    Really was what it seemed under the sun,
That the actual was not real and the real was not with us
    And all that mattered was the One.
And they said '‘The man in the street is so naïve, he never
    Can see the wood for the trees;
He thinks he knows he sees a thing but cannot
    Tell you how he knows the thing he thinks he sees.'
’And oh how much I liked the Concrete Universal,
    I never thought that I should
Be telling them vice-versa
    That they can'’t see the trees for the wood.
But certainly it was fun while it lasted
    And I got my honours degree
And was stamped as a person of intelligence and culture
    For ever wherever two or three
Persons of intelligence and culture
    Are gathered together in talk
Writing definitions on invisible blackboards
    In non-existent chalk.
But such sacramental occasions
    Are nowadays comparatively rare;
There is always a wife or a boss or a dun or a client
    Disturbing the air.
Barbarians always, life in the particular always,
    Dozens of men in the street,
And the perennial if unimportant problem
    Of getting enough to eat.
So blow the bugles over the metaphysicians,
    Let the pure mind return to the Pure Mind;
I must be content to remain in the world of Appearance
    And sit on the mere appearance of a behind.
But in case you should think my education was wasted
    I hasten to explain
That having once been to the University of Oxford
    You can never really again
Believe anything that anyone says and that of course is an asset
    In a world like ours;
Why bother to water a garden
    That is planted with paper flowers?
O the Freedom of the Press, the Late Night Final,
    To-morrow’s pulp;
One should not gulp one’'s port but as it isn'’t
    Port, I'’ll gulp it if I want to gulp
But probably I'’ll just enjoy the colour
    And pour it down the sink
For I don'’t call advertisement a statement
    Or any quack medicine a drink.
Good-bye now, Plato and Hegel,
    The shop is closing down;
They don'’t want any philosopher-kings in England,
    There ain'’t no universals in this man'’s town.

Norman Douglas (1868-1952), How About Europe? Some Footnotes on East and West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), p. 161:

Far too many excellent people are rushing about needlessly, groaning under a load of duties to be performed and puzzling how to avoid them. When a duty ceases to be a pleasure, then it ceases to exist. I recommend this maxim to those who would like to be masters of their own lives.

Thomas Thornley (1855-1949), "Over-Worked," Verses from Fen and Fell (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1919), pp. 53-54:

(A visit to a Government Department)

A gifted friend, I long had known,
Has lately risen to power and place;
I made a pilgrimage of grace,
To see him seated on his throne.

I found him, as my way I picked
Through serried desks, in acid tone,
Complaining through a telephone,
While all around the typers ticked.

He answered with a dreary laugh,
My question how his labour sped,
'If all were done and I were dead,
These words might be my epitaph—

"His labour served but to reveal
A modern type of mountain 'mus,'
He rolled the stone of Sisyphus,
And turned Ixion's useless wheel.

Behind him, whispering bad advice,
An atra-bilious 'Cura' sat—
A care that would have killed the cat
That lapped the milk of Paradise."'

The wine of life, he said, was corked,
The country speeding to the dogs,
The people, foolish as the frogs,
Their log deposed, were now be-storked.

Quoth he 'The wisdom of the day,
Hard on the heels of folly treads,
And thinks, by counting brainless heads,
To charm a nation's ills away.'

He said that no one cared a jot
For aught but his peculiar fad,
There was no balm in Gilead,
Physicians were a wrangling lot;

That things were 'ganging all agley,'
With food, munitions, mice and men,
And, adding 'England is a fen,'
He sighed old Chelsea's 'Ay di mi';

That politicians all were bought,
And trimmed to every wind that blew,
In short, that everyone he knew,
Was doing nothing that he ought.

I let him say his saddening say,
Then, thinking over-work and spleen
Sat on the pulse of his machine,
I softly took myself away.

Oliver Heslop, Northumberland Words, Vol. I (London: English Dialect Society, 1892), p. 23:

AY-DI-MI! a common exclamation expressive of regret or pity, Probably shortened from Ah, dear me! Familiarised by Thomas Carlyle's letters, but often heard as a sigh expressed by old people in Northumberland.

Wang An-shih (1021-1086), "Hymn," tr. David Hinton:

Dawn lights up the room. I close my book and sleep,
dreaming of Bell Mountain and full of tenderness.

How do you grow old living with failure and disgrace?
Just go back to the cascading creek: cold, shimmering.

Theodore Dalrymple, "From Sir, With Love," Taki Magazine (May 4, 2014):

"Are you a tyrant yourself, sir?" asked another customer.

"No, sir," I replied, "I am not."

"An aspiring tyrant, perhaps?"

I think I can put my hand on my heart and say that I have no tyrannical leanings, though no doubt like everyone else there are a few things that I should like to see prohibited, such as (in my case) chewing gum, drinks sold in cans, baseball caps, rock and other forms of pop music in public places, and preferably in private as well, fast food, men wearing suits without ties, television, mobile telephones in trains and restaurants, burqas (except for drunken British girls on Friday and Saturday nights, for whom they should be compulsory), tattoos, piercings, celebrity magazines, pasteurised cheese, the use of the word chair for chairman, conversations in public about football, the Olympic Games, jeans, skateboards, eating in the streets, coffee served in plastic containers, basketball, etc.

Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), pp. 517-518:

I began my teaching career forty years ago in an academic context dominated by the ideas of T.S. Eliot; ideas that roused me to fury, and against which I fought as vigorously as I could. Finding myself now surrounded by professors of hip-hop; by clones of Gallic-Germanic theory; by ideologues of gender and of various sexual persuasions; by multiculturalists unlimited, I realize that the Balkanization of literary studies is irreversible. All of these Resenters of the aesthetic value of literature are not going to go away, and they will raise up institutional resenters after them. As an aged institutional Romantic, I still decline the Eliotic nostalgia for Theocratic ideology, but I see no reason for arguing with anyone about literary preferences. This book is not directed to academics, because only a small remnant of them still read for the love of reading. What Johnson and Woolf after him called the Common Reader still exists and possibly goes on welcoming suggestions of what might be read.

Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence. So fantastic has the academy become that I have heard this kind of reader denounced by an eminent critic, who told me that reading without a constructive social purpose was unethical and urged me to re-educate myself through an immersion in the writing of Abdul Jan Mohammed, a leader of the Birmingham (England) school of cultural materialism. As an addict who will read anything, I obeyed, but I am not saved, and return to tell you neither what to read nor how to read it, only what I have read and think worthy of rereading, which may be the only pragmatic test for the canonical.

Id., p. 519:

I do not believe that literary studies as such have a future, but this does not mean that literary criticism will die. As a branch of literature, criticism will survive, but probably not in our teaching institutions. The study of Western literature will also continue, but on the much more modest scale of our current Classics departments. What are now called "Departments of English" will be renamed departments of "Cultural Studies" where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens. Major, once-elitist universities and colleges will still offer a few courses in Shakespeare, Milton, and their peers, but these will be taught by departments of three or four scholars, equivalent to teachers of ancient Greek and Latin. This development hardly need be deplored; only a few handfuls of students now enter Yale with an authentic passion for reading. You cannot teach someone to love great poetry if they come to you without such love. How can you teach solitude? Real reading is a lonely activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen. Perhaps the ages of reading—Aristocratic, Democratic, Chaotic—now reach terminus, and the reborn Theocratic era will be almost wholly an oral and visual culture.

Id., pp. 519-520:

[T]he teaching of poems, plays, stories, and novels is now supplanted by cheerleading for various social and political crusades. Or else, the artifacts of popular culture replace the difficult artifices of great writers as the material for instruction. It is not "literature" that needs to be redefined; if you can't recognize it when you read it, then no one can help you to know it or love it better. "A culture of universal access" is offered by post-Marxist idealists as the solution to "crisis," but how can Paradise Lost or Faust, Part Two ever lend themselves to universal access? The strongest poetry is cognitively and imaginatively too difficult to be read deeply by more than a relatively few of any social class, gender, race, or ethnic origin.

When I was a boy, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, almost universally part of the school curriculum, was an eminently sensible introduction to Shakespearean tragedy. Teachers now tell me of many schools where the play can no longer be read through, since students find it beyond their attention spans. In two places reported to me, the making of cardboard shields and swords has replaced the reading and discussion of the play. No socializing of the means of production and consumption of literature can overcome such debasement of early education. The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier. Trotsky urged his fellow Marxists to read Dante, but he would find no welcome in our current universities.

I am your true Marxist critic, following Groucho rather than Karl, and I take as my motto Groucho's grand admonition, "Whatever it is, I'm against it!" I have been against, in turn, the neo-Christian New Criticism of T.S. Eliot and his academic followers; the deconstruction of Paul de Man and his clones; the current rampages of New Left and Old Right on the supposed inequities, and even more dubious moralities, of the literary Canon.

H.S. Versnel, "A Parody on Hymns in Martial V 24 and Some Trinitarian Problems," Mnemosyne 27 (1974) 365-405 (at 366, n. 3):

By now I am convinced of three things: 1. every commentator copies his predecessor(s); 2. though carefully seeing to it that the really good comments, preferably those from the 17th century, be omitted; 3. "L'étude approfondie des réalités doit nécessairement précéder le jugement esthétique: sans elle il n'est point d'interprétation littéraire" (L. Robert, in L'Épigramme grecque, Entretiens Hardt, XIV, Genève 1967, 201).

Related post: Scholarly Psittacism.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972), "Translators of Greek," Instigations (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), pp. 321-356 (at 350):

The Latin can be a whole commentary on the Greek, or at least it can give one the whole parsing and order, and let one proceed at a comforable [sic, read comfortable] rate with but the most rudimentary knowledge of the original language. And I do not think this a trifle; it would be an ill day if men again let the classics go by the board; we should fall into something worse than, or as bad as, the counterreformation: a welter of gum-shoes, and cocoa, and Y.M.C.A. and Webbs, and social theorizing committees, and the general hell of a groggy doctrinaire obfuscation; and the very disagreeablizing of the classics, every pedagogy which puts the masterwork further from us, either by obstructing the schoolboy, or breeding affectation in dilettante readers, works toward such a detestable end.

Norman Douglas (1868-1952), How About Europe? Some Footnotes on East and West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), pp. 22-23:

Go to the East, young man; leave behind you the frowsy and fidgety little hole called Europe. Savour the remedial effects of that other continent before you are caught in our humiliating machinery; before you are ticketed and labelled as to your monetary worth to a worthless 'community'; before you are taxed, and overtaxed, for the purpose of keeping alive thousands of people who ought to be dead.

Get out of Europe! Rectify your values while there is still some flexibility in your mind, and learn to laugh at the flabby gibberings of our cultured classes and the comical bestiality of their inferiors, our nauseating politics and childish social ideals, our moral hypocrisy that breeds liars, the inquisitorial tyranny of our laws that breeds cowards, and certain absurd newspapers whose function consists in persuading us to attach importance to what is not worth thinking about. Get out of it!

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, letter to Annie Adams Fields (May 1862):

I suppose he [Thoreau] believed that beasts and reptiles, birds and fishes fulfilled their ends, and that man generally came short. So he respected the one and avoided the other.

John J. Chapman, Two Greek Plays: The Philoctetes of Sophocles and the Medea of Euripides (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928), p. 114:

In spite of all the essays that scholars and dilettanti have written about translating the classics, the task is chiefly valuable as an agreeable pastime for elderly gentlemen with time on their hands. And one may feel sure that such men will never be satisfied with anything that other elderly men with time on their hands have said about the matter. The game is endless, and therein lies its charm.

T'ao Yuan-ming (365-427) "Poem in the Form of a Coffin-Puller's Song, No. 1," tr. Burton Watson in The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 140:

What has a life must have a death;
an early end doesn't mean the lifespan's been shortened.
Last evening I was the same as other people;
this morning I'm listed in the roster of the dead.
When soul and breath scatter, where do they go,
when the wasted form's consigned to hollow wood?
My little boy, wailing, searches for his father;
my close friends caress me and mourn.
I know nothing now of gain or loss;
how could I distinguish right from wrong?
A thousand autumns, ten thousand years after,
who'll know if I lived in glory or disgrace?
I only regret that while I was in the world
I never got to drink enough wine!

Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), "An Epistle Wrote from Mavisbank, March 1748, to a Friend in Edinburgh":

Dear friend, to smoak and noise confine'd,
which Soils your Shirt, and frets your mind,
and makes you rusty look, and crabbed,
as if you were bepoxed, or Scabbed,
or had been going through a dose        5
of Mercury, to save your Nose,
let me advise you, out of pity,
to leave the chattering, Stinking city;
wher pride, and Shallowness, take place
of plain Integrety, and grace,        10
where hidious Screams, would kill a Cat,
of who buys this or who buys that,
and through the Day from break of Mornings
the buz of Bills, protests, and Hornings,
besides the everlasting Squable        15
amongst the great and litle Rable
who tear their Lungs, & deave your Ears,
with all their party hopes and fears,
while ratling o'er their silly Cant,
learn'd from the Mercury, and Currant,    20
about the Aid that comes from Russia,
and the neutrality of Prussia,
of ffrance's Tyranie and Slavery,
of Holands Selfishness & knavery,
of Spain, the most beloved Son        25
of the old whore of Babylon,
the Guardian of her whips & fagots
and all her superstitious magots,
of all his gambols on the Green
with Hungary's Imperial Queen,        30
of Genoa's resolute resistance
without Napolitan assistance,
of passing Var, seiging Savona,
and breaking fidles at Cremona,
of how much Blood & dirt is cost        35
before a Town is won or lost,
of Popes, Stateholders, faith's Deffenders,
Generals, Marshals, and pretenders,
of Treaties, Ministers, and Kings,
and of a Thousand other Things,        40
of all which their Conceptions Dull,
sutes with the thickness of the Scull,
yet with such Stuff one must be worried,
that's through the City gauntlet hurried.

But Ah! ye cry, the dear dear Dances         45
with Beautys brisk, who harm our fancys,
for five or six gay hours complete
in circles of the Assembly Sweet,
who can forsake so fair a field
where all to conquering Beauty yield.        50
No doubt while in this am'rous fit
your next plea's Boxes, and the pit,
where wit, and humours of the Age
flow entertaining from the Stage,
where, if the Drama's right conducted,        55
one's both diverted and instructed.

Well I shall grant it bears with Reason
these have their charms in proper Season,
but must not be indulg'd too much,
lest they the Soften'd Soul bewitch,        60
and faculties in fetters bind
that are for greater ends design'd.

Then, rouze ye from these dosing Dreams,
come view with me the golden Beams,
which Phebus every Morning pours         65
upon the plains, adorn'd with flowers,
with me o'er springing verdures stray,
where wimpling watters make their way,
here from the Oak with Ivy bound
you'll hear the soft melodious Sound        70
of all the Choiresters on hy
whose notes re-echoe through the skie,
better than concerts of your Town,
yet do not cost you half a crown;
here Blackbirds, Mavises & Linnets,        75
excell your fidles, flutes, & Spinnets.
Next we may mount the broomy Height
and wild, wide Landskips chear our Sight,
diverted with the bleating Tribe,
and plough-men whistling oer the Glibe.        80

Thus we, with little Labour, gain
firm Health, and all its Joyfull Train,
silent repose, the chearfull Smile,
which best intruding cares beguile,
and makes the Springs of Life to flow        85
through every vein with kindly glow,
giving the Cheek a rosie teint
surpassing all the arts of paint.

The Heights survey'd, we may return
along the Margin of the Burn,        90
where fishes will divert your Eye
while jumping up to catch a fly,
which taught the Angler first to wait
and Hook them with the tempting Bait.
Next the fair Gardens we may trace        95
where art adds life to Native grace,
The Walls & Espaliers Load, & lined
with fruits of the best chosen kind,
the Borders fraughted with delight,
to please the Smelling, & the Sight,        100
while Ecchoe entertains the Ear
when rais'd by Notes well tune'd, & clear.

Such Morning walks, the Balmy Air,
improves the gust for healthy fair,
and, when the Bell for Breakfast rings,        105
at heels you'll find Hermetick wings,
to reach a Table, neatly crownd,
with all that's hearty, hale, & sound,
where in the shining vessels stand
Blessings of Jacob's promised Land,        110
of which with freedom you may share,
for ceremony comes not there.

Nature refresh'd, you may retire
with Books that jump with your Desire;
if cloudy Skies keep you within,        115
you've Closets warm & free from Din,
where in the well degested pages
you may review the by past ages,
or, with great Newton, take a flight
through all the rolling Orbs of Light,        120
their order note, their bulk & shine,
'till fire'd with raptures all divine,
or with the pen, and pincell's aid,
trace nature out in Light & Shade
with freedom, in a bold out line,        125
like Sachi, or Salvator, shine.

If Zyphers, and the radiant bleeze,
invite you to the Shady Trees,
some hours, in indolence, to pass
extended on the velvet gras,        130
with Milton, Pope, & all the Rest,
who smoothly coppy Nature best,
their Lays inspired, peruse, and find,
what brightens, and improves, the Mind,
and carrys it a pitch beyond        135
these views, of which Low Minds are fond.

This is the Life, all those have sung,
most to be wish'd by old, and young,
by the most Brave, and the most ffair,
where Least Ambition, least of Care,        140
desturbs the Soul, where virteous Ease,
and Temperance, never cease to please.

6 Mercury: treatment for venereal disease
14 Hornings: letters of horning were "a process of execution issued under the signet directing a messenger to charge a debtor to pay or perform in terms of the letters, under pain of being 'put to the horn', i.e. declared rebel" (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. horning, n., sense 4).
17 deave: deafen
20 Mercury, and Currant: newspapers, the Caledonian Mercury and the Edinburgh Evening Courant
21-34: references to the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748)
26 old whore of Babylon: Roman Catholic Church
28 magots: maggots, i.e. odd notions or ideas
46 harm: should charm be read here?
68 wimpling: winding, meandering
80 Glibe: glebe, soil
90 Margin of the Burn: bank of the stream
104 gust for healthy fair: appetite for healthy fare
106 Hermetick wings: as messenger of the gods, Hermes wore winged sandals.
114 jump: agree completely, coincide (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. jump, v., sense 5.a)
126 Andrea Sacchi (1599-1661) and Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) were Italian painters.
127 bleeze: blaze

John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), Altavona: Fact and Fiction from My Life in the Highlands (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1882), p. 240:

CH.—You do not really mean to say, Miss Flora, that there can be any wisdom in serving God by systematically renouncing all the good things which he has prepared for us? Is it not rather monstrous ingratitude and most faulty manners, when a kind host spreads the board with all sorts of dainties for your entertainment, to refuse to taste one of them, and wrap yourself up in the cold garb of general abstinence? It brings me to despair of humanity when I think that the highest Christian authorities for centuries should have set the seal of their approval on such a hateful caricature of the piety of their Master.

Anatole France (1844-1924), The Garden of Epicurus, tr. Alfred Allinson (London: John Lane, 1920), p. 101:

We call men dangerous whose minds are made differently from our own, and immoral those who profess another standard of ethics. We condemn as sceptics all who do not share our own illusions, without ever troubling our heads to inquire if they have others of their own.

The French, from Le Jardin d'Épicure, 9th ed. (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1895), p. 116:

Nous appelons dangereux ceux qui ont l'esprit fait autrement que le nôtre et immoraux ceux qui n'ont point notre morale. Nous appelons sceptiques ceux qui n'ont point nos propres illusions, sans même nous inquiéter s'ils en ont d'autres.

Norman Douglas (1868-1952), How About Europe? Some Footnotes on East and West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), pp. 118-119:

A system of polytheism such as we find in Homer can be evolved only among men who are really free, men of good health, of sensitive and alert minds; men who possess constructive imagination and a deep sympathy—a kind of masonic feeling—for the processes of nature. These are the qualifications; and we no longer have them. The Christian theory that polytheism points to a low state of culture is refuted by the life described in these poems, which reveal an ethical outlook cleaner than our own; the morality, private and public, of these polytheists has extorted praise from all scholars, including the sanctimonious Mr. Gladstone. Their standard of female virtue, for example, contrasts favourably with what our monotheistic teachers have told us about women. And that is a crucial test. Gladstone cannot avoid making his usual reservation in favour of Christianity; he says, nevertheless, that 'it would be hard to discover any period of history, or country of the world, not being Christian, in which women stood so high as with the Greeks of the heroic age.'

Id., p. 121:

If we must have gods, let us have them by the score—it is the only way out of the difficulty. Let us have them numerous as in the streets of old Naples, where, according to Symmachus, it was easier to encounter a god than a man. The more the merrier. Then we shall know on whom to fix the blame, when anything disagreeable happens to us. At present, God being good, we are up a tree.

According to Symmachus, or Petronius? See Petronius, Satyricon 17.5:

utique nostra regio tam praesentibus plena est numinibus ut facilius possis deum quam hominem invenire.

Related post: Pound on Polytheism.

"Passages from Hawthorne's Notebooks, XI," Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XVIII, No. 109 (November 1866) 536-544 (at 540):

Here now are whortleberries, ripe and black, growing actually within reach of my hand, yet unseen till this moment. Were we to sit here all day,—a week, a month, and doubtless a lifetime,—objects would thus still be presenting themselves as new, though there would seem to be no reason why we should not have detected them all at the first moment.

Robert Gunther (1869-1940), quoted by Christopher Stray, "Dictionary mongers," Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (May 5, 2014):

The Delegates [of the Clarendon Press] never realized what a monkey house their employees made of the Old Ashmolean. How their young male assistants used to keep rushing up the stairs with their latest lexicographical slips to the upper room where shrieks of feminine laughter rewarded their lexicographical discoveries.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

Norman Douglas (1868-1952), How About Europe? Some Footnotes on East and West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), pp. 93-94:

When all is said and done, an intelligent interest in food—how to prepare it and how to enjoy it—is no illusory sign of civilization. Judged by this test, the French stand in the front rank of civilized people.

Seneca, Suasoriae 4.2 (quoting from a declamation by Arellius Fuscus; tr. Michael Winterbottom):

But those who have, as they put it, "launched themselves" into the mysterious certainties of fate enquire into birthdays, and regard the first hour of life as a harbinger of all the years to follow. They work out what the movement of the stars was at that date, in what directions they scattered. Did the sun stand in ominous opposition, or shine on the scene calmly? Did the moon receive her full light, or was she at the beginning of her waxing, or had she hidden her darkened head in night? Did Saturn welcome the newborn child to cultivate the fields, or Mars as a soldier for war, or Mercury as a businessman for profit, or did Venus nod graciously on the baby? Did Jupiter bear it from low to high? So many gods bustling about one head!

qui vero in media se, ut praedicant, fatorum misere pignora, natales inquirunt et primam aevi horam omnium annorum habent nuntiam; quo ierint motu sidera, in quas discucurrerint partes, contrane dirus steterit an placidus adfulserit Sol; [in] plenam lucem an initia surgentis acceperit, an abdiderit in noctem obscurum caput Luna; Saturnus nascentem <ad agrorum cultum>, an ad bella Mars militem, an negotiosum in quaestus Mercurius exceperit, an blanda adnuerit nascenti Venus, an ex humili in sublime Iuppiter tulerit, aestimant: tot circa unum caput tumultuantis deos!

pignora codd.: signa Lennart Håkanson
dirus Martin Gertz: deus codd., durus Emil Thomas
[in] del. Emil Thomas
nascentem codd.: ad sementem Adam Eussner
<ad agrorum cultum> suppl. Clemens Konitzer

At first I thought this passage might refer to the day of the week on which a child is born, i.e.

• Sunday (sun)
• Monday (moon)
• Saturday (Saturn)
• Tuesday (Mars, cf. mardi)
• Wednesday (Mercury, cf. mercredi)
• Friday (Venus, cf. vendredi)
• Thursday (Jupiter, cf. jeudi)

But the reality seems more complicated. See, e.g., Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos 4.4 (tr. Frank Egleston Robbins):

The lord of action is apprehended by two methods, from the sun and from the culminating sign. For it will be needful to look both for the planet that has made its morning appearance closest to the sun, and that which is at mid‑heaven, particularly when it occupies the application of the moon; and if the same star occupies both the aforesaid positions, this alone must be employed, and similarly if none occupies one of these places, we must use only the one which occupies the other of the places. And if one planet has made the nearest morning appearance and another is associated with the mid‑heaven, and with the moon, we must employ them both, giving preference to the one which by reason of its strength has the greater number of claims to domination according to the scheme which we have already set forth. But if not one is found which either has made an appearance or is at mid‑heaven, we must take the lord of the latter region, with reference however to the occasional pursuits of the subject, for persons with such genitures are for the most part inactive.

Thus, then, we shall determine the planet that governs action. The quality of the action, however, is to be discerned from the character of the three planets, Mars, Venus, and Mercury, and from that of the signs through which they happen appear to be passing. For if Mercury governs action, to speak generally, he makes his subjects scribes, men of business, calculators, teachers, merchants, bankers, soothsayers, astrologers, sacrificers, and in general those who perform their functions by means of documents, interpretation, and giving and taking. And if Saturn testifies to him, they will be managers of the property of others, interpreters of dreams, or frequenters of temples for the purpose of prophecies and inspiration. If it is Jupiter that witnesses, they will be law-makers, orators, sophists, who enjoy familiarity with great persons. If Venus rules action, she makes her subjects persons whose activities lie among the perfumes of flowers or of unguents, in wine, colours, dyes, spices, or adornments, as, for example, sellers of unguents, weavers of chaplets, innkeepers, wine-merchants, druggists, weavers, dealers in spices, painters, dyers, sellers of clothing. And if Saturn testifies to her, she makes them dealers in goods used for pleasure or adornment, sorcerers, poisoners, panders, and those who make their living from similar occupations. If Jupiter testifies, they will be athletes, wearers of the wreath, persons deemed worthy of honours, and men who derive advancement from women.

Mars, in aspect with the sun, makes his subjects those who use fire in their crafts, such as cooks, moulders, cauterizers, smiths, workers in mines; if he is not with the sun, those who work with iron, such as shipbuilders, carpenters, farmers, quarrymen, stone-dressers, jewellers, splitters of wood, and their subordinate workers. If Saturn testifies to him, he produces seamen, drawers of water, tunnelers, painters, gamekeepers, cooks, embalmers. If Jupiter testifies, he produces soldiers, servants, publicans, innkeepers, ferrymen, assistants at sacrifice.

The thought also occurred to me that these planetary influences might lie behind some of the "occupational" priamels found in Greek and Latin literature. See Elroy L. Bundy, Studia Pindarica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 11, n. 34, for a list of "priamels of this occupational (or preoccupational) type." We would need a priamel with seven occupations, each corresponding to one of the planets. If we combine farmer and peasant, sailor and merchant, Horace, Odes 1.1 contains eight occupations (seven plus Horace's own occupation of poet), but I doubt whether the ode should be forced into such a rigid scheme.

Related post: Monday's Child is Fair of Face.

Norman Douglas (1868-1952), How About Europe? Some Footnotes on East and West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), p. 21:

Curry is India's gift to mankind; her contribution to human happiness.

Norman Douglas (1868-1952), How About Europe? Some Footnotes on East and West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), pp. 25-26:

The Western notion seems to be this: some dogs can learn tricks, therefore all dogs must learn them. Are we ever going to realize that we have our unteachables too, and that to keep them in schools is wasting not only our money but their time? Presumably not. The school-age is continually being raised. Soon we shall be doing sums when we might be getting married. Under discipline all the time, and coddled like little girls! The consequence is that England is full of well-groomed adolescents of twenty-five, with no more poise or self-reliance than a Newfoundland puppy.

Alessandro Barchiesi, review of R.G.M. Nisbet and Niall Rudd, A Commentary on Horace, Odes Book III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), in Classical World 100 (2006) 73-74 (at 74):

[I]t is a sobering thought that neither of the two leading commentators on Roman poetry uses a word-processor: E.J. Kenney prefers a typewriter, and Nisbet a black ballpoint pen.

Norman Douglas (1868-1952), How About Europe? Some Footnotes on East and West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), pp. 32-33:

A supply of men who have not inhaled that poison-gas of education which paralyses our nerve-centres of independent thought would be a national asset in times of stress; a reservoir of sturdy sanity.

Related post: Emphasis on Individuality.

Norman Douglas (1868-1952), How About Europe? Some Footnotes on East and West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), p. 5:

An occasional spasm of lucidity is all we may ever expect. Enlightened individuals crop up in the most unlikely places and epochs; enlightened groups of them are as common as a flock of white blackbirds. The world has grown not only older since Pericles; it has grown stupider.

W.G. Waddell, "A Teacher of Classics in Egypt," Classical Journal 28.7 (April 1933) 489-496 (at 489, n. 2):

As an indication of the popular feeling in Egypt towards ancient culture, it may be mentioned that when the chairs of Latin and Greek were created at Cairo, a journalist wrote in an Arabic newspaper: "Why should Egyptian students learn Greek, the language of grocers and sardine-sellers?"

When I look back on my misspent life, I sometimes wish I had never left the town where I grew up. This sonnet by Joachim Du Bellay, number 25 of Les Regrets, expresses the feeling:

Malheureux l'an, le mois, le jour, l'heure et le point,
Et malheureuse soit la flatteuse espérance,
Quand pour venir ici j'abandonnai la France:
La France, et mon Anjou, dont le désir me point.

Vraiment d'un bon oiseau guidé je ne fus point,
Et mon coeur me donnait assez signifiance
Que le ciel était plein de mauvaise influence,
Et que Mars était lors à Saturne conjoint.

Cent fois le bon avis lors m'en voulut distraire,
Mais toujours le destin me tirait au contraire:
Et si mon désir n'eût aveuglé ma raison,

N'était-ce pas assez pour rompre mon voyage,
Quand sur le seuil de l'huis, d'un sinistre présage,
Je me blessai le pied sortant de ma maison?

The text, in modern spelling, comes from Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets précédé de Les Antiquités de Rome et suivi de La Défense et Illustration de la Langue française (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 85. Thanks to the generous friend who sent me this book as a gift.

Here is a translation of the sonnet by Richard Helgerson:

Cursed be the year, the month, the day, the hour, and the instant, and cursed be the flattering hope, when to come here I left France, France and my Anjou, for which longing torments me.

Truly I was not led by a bird of good fortune, and my heart gave me plenty of warning that the heavens were charged with bad influence and that Mars was then housed with Saturn.

A hundred times good advice tried to draw me back, but fate always pulled me the other way, and had desire not blinded my reason,

Was it not enough to cancel my trip when—sinister omen!—I injured my foot on the doorstep as I was leaving the house?

Related posts:

• Heureux Qui Comme Ulysse
• Homecoming
• Home Sweet Home (Homer, Theognis, Marcantonio Flaminio)
• Home Sweet Home (Catullus)
• My Native Hills
• Death Far From Home

Joachim Du Bellay (1522-1560), "To the Reader," at the beginning of Les Regrets (tr. Richard Helgerson):

This little book, Reader, that we give you now has at once the taste of gall and honey mixed with salt. If it pleases your palate, come as a guest. If not, please go away. I did not mean to invite you to the feast.

The Latin ("Ad Lectorem"):

Quem, lector, tibi nunc damus libellum,
Hic fellisque simul, simulque mellis,
Permixtumque salis refert saporem.
Si gratum quid erit tuo palato,
Huc conviva veni: tibi haec parata est
Coena. Sin minus, hinc facesse, quaeso:
Ad hanc te volui haud vocare coenam.

Related post: Martial on Blogging.

Anatole France (1844-1924), The Garden of Epicurus, tr. Alfred Allinson (London: John Lane, 1920), p. 73:

I am convinced in my own mind that humanity has always identically the same total of folly and dullness to spend. It is a capital that is bound to bear interest in one way or another. The great thing to know is whether, after all, the imbecilities that time has consecrated do not form the best investment a man can make of his stupidity. Far from feeling glad when I see some time-honoured fallacy exploded, I think of the new one that will come and take its place, and I ask myself the anxious question,—will it not perhaps be more inconvenient and dangerous than the other? On full and sufficient consideration, the old prejudices are less baneful than the new; time, by long usage, has given them a polish and made them almost innocent.

The French, from Le Jardin d'Épicure, 9th ed. (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1895), pp. 85-86:

Je suis persuadé que l'humanité a de tout temps la même somme de folie et de bêtise à dépenser. C'est un capital qui doit fructifier d'une manière ou d'une autre. La question est de savoir si, après tout, les insanités consacrées par le temps ne constituent pas le placement le plus sage qu'un homme puisse faire de sa bêtise. Loin de me réjouir quand je vois s'en aller quelque vieille erreur, je songe à l'erreur nouvelle qui viendra la remplacer, et je me demande avec inquiétude si elle ne sera pas plus incommode ou plus dangereuse que l'autre. A tout bien considérer, les vieux préjugés sont moins funestes que les nouveaux: le temps, en les usant, les a polis et rendus presque innocents.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, Lecture II:

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. In one man's head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man against all men.

John Clare (1793-1864), The Prose of John Clare, edd. J.W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), pp. 226-227:

Be not righteous over much—the enthusiasts often give us their own fanatical absurditys for gospel & condemn everybody's religion but their own—these people think as familiar of the Deity as a man would of his children & a master of his servants—& as Warburton says they make God after man's image & chuse the worst models they can find—themselves

John Stuart Mill (1806-1883), Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, chapter VI, § 2:

A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.

James Hannay (1827-1873), "Horace and Juvenal," Satire and Satirists: Six Lectures (London: David Bogue, 1854), pp. 3-52 (at 29-30):

His Songs would give you a notion that he indulged in a romantic sort of dissipation. This arises from their not being rightly viewed as fancy-pictures—pictures on the ivory of the Latin language,—of old Lesbian life, and Ionian life, farther south, and long before. To me Horace seems a far homelier, simpler old gentleman than the classical conventionalists would have you suppose. A little, stoutish, weak-eyed, satirical, middle-aged man, sitting—with what hair he had left, smeared with Syrian ointment—crowned, under a vine, drinking, in company of a Greek young woman, with an ivy crown on her head, playing or dancing,—is to me a ludicrous object. I do not think that the simple and philosophic Horatius, with his eye for satire, was much given to this mode of enjoyment. I am pretty sure that he did enjoy himself; but I rather fancy him eating a too luxurious dinner now and then, cramming himself with tunny-fish, muscles, oysters, hare, thrushes, peacock, and whatever else was going; and atoning for it by much quiet and a little rustication in his farm. I am certain that he was, in the main, a homely little man; and that the finish and elegance he shows in his writings did not appear so conspicuously in his person and in the objects about him.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, Lecture I:

Surely it seems a very strange-looking thing this Paganism; almost inconceivable to us in these days. A bewildering, inextricable jungle of delusions, confusions, falsehoods, and absurdities, covering the whole field of Life! A thing that fills us with astonishment, almost, if it were possible, with incredulity,—for truly it is not easy to understand that sane men could ever calmly, with their eyes open, believe and live by such a set of doctrines. That men should have worshipped their poor fellow-man as a God, and not him only, but stocks and stones, and all manner of animate and inanimate objects; and fashioned for themselves such a distracted chaos of hallucinations by way of Theory of the Universe: all this looks like an incredible fable. Nevertheless it is a clear fact that they did it. Such hideous inextricable jungle of misworships, misbeliefs, men, made as we are, did actually hold by, and live at home in. This is strange. Yes, we may pause in sorrow and silence over the depths of darkness that are in man; if we rejoice in the heights of purer vision he has attained to. Such things were and are in man; in all men; in us too.

[....]

We shall begin to have a chance of understanding Paganism, when we first admit that to its followers it was, at one time, earnestly true. Let us consider it very certain that men did believe in Paganism; men with open eyes, sound senses, men made altogether like ourselves; that we, had we been there, should have believed in it.

Related post: Understanding Pre-Christian Religious Attitudes.