Laudator Temporis Acti

Roger Cohen, "Harvest of Anger," New York Times (September 9, 2010, speaking of events after September 11, 2001):

A hideous neologism, the "homeland," was coined to describe a country that now needed vigilant protection from within and without.

The word isn't a neologism—the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is

1670 R. BLOME Treat. Trav. & Traff. 53 Another sort of Merchants, which may be termed Homeland-Traders..who drive a trade to Scotland and Ireland.

However, most of the supposed early examples in Google Books are the result of faulty optical character recognition of the phrases "home and" and "Homer and".

De gustibus non est disputandum, but to my ear and sensibility the word isn't hideous either. On the contrary, it has a comforting sound.

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Spring, XVII):

Scholarship in the high sense was denied me, and now it is too late. Yet here am I gloating over Pausanias, and promising myself to read every word of him. Who that has any tincture of old letters would not like to read Pausanias, instead of mere quotations from him and references to him? Here are the volumes of Dahn's Die Könige der Germanen: who would not like to know all he can about the Teutonic conquerors of Rome? And so on, and so on. To the end I shall be reading—and forgetting. Ah, that's the worst of it! Had I at command all the knowledge I have at any time possessed, I might call myself a learned man. Nothing surely is so bad for the memory as long-enduring worry, agitation, fear. I cannot preserve more than a few fragments of what I read, yet read I shall, persistently, rejoicingly. Would I gather erudition for a future life? Indeed, it no longer troubles me that I forget. I have the happiness of the passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?

My happiness was considerably increased yesterday by the receipt of volume 1 of Martial, Epigrams, edited and translated by D.R. Shackleton Bailey, and G.S. Kirk's commentary on books 5-8 of the Iliad, the very generous gifts of "David F." Thank you, David—these books will give me weeks of unalloyed enjoyment.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 94 Degrees in the Shade

David Culross Peattie, An Almanach for Moderns (September 10):

In autumn some of the sweetness of spring steals back again. There are the blessed rains, the sharp nights, the mornings smelling of wet loam and winy air as if blown from the mountains. The woods are filling up with clouds of asters. And best of all, the birds return. Few are the voices of the forest, but the robin has taken to singing again his old "Cheer up, cheery, Wake up, weary!" The grackles gather in the wet woods just as they do in March, and from the fields comes a slender, wistful whistling of all songs I know the most poignant except the farewell whistling of the white-throat sparrow. But there is something sad about these songs, something that merely reminds us of a happiness we once knew, that is gone.

Asters are now flowering in my garden. Most of them I planted, but I do notice one interloper this fall, what looks to me like Ageratina altissima, commonly known as white snakeroot:


Some regard it as a noxious weed, but I'm letting it stay for now, as the bees are fond of it.

Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 1.23.63 (tr. H. Rackham):

Since as for Protagoras of Abdera, the greatest sophist of that age, to whom you just now alluded, for beginning a book with the words 'About the gods I am unable to affirm either how they exist or how they do not exist,' he was sentenced by a decree of the Athenian assembly to be banished from the city and from the country, and to have his books burnt in the market-place: an example that I can well believe has discouraged many people since from professing atheism, since the mere expression of doubt did not succeed in escaping punishment.

Nam Abderites quidem Protagoras, cuius a te modo mentio facta est, sophistes temporibus illis vel maximus, cum in principio libri sic posuisset: 'De divis, neque ut sint neque ut non sint, habeo dicere', Atheniensium iussu urbe atque agro est exterminatus librique eius in contione combusti; ex quo equidem existimo tardiores ad hanc sententiam profitendam multos esse factos, quippe cum poenam ne dubitatio quidem effugere potuisset.

Clarence A. Forbes, "Books for the Burning," Transactions of the American Philological Association 67 (1936) 114-125 (at 118):

The book of Protagoras was only the first of a long line that were burned for religious reasons. Religion has always been the chief cause for the deliberate destruction of books, and the histories of western religion have about them a pungent smell of smoke.

Forbes, p. 125:

For the true art of unjust censorship to develop, the world had to wait until the modern era. We of the twentieth century live in glass houses, and had best be chary of throwing stones.

Burning Books (May 10, 1933)

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Winter, XV):

It is one of the dreary aspects of modern life that natural symbolism has all but perished. We have no consecrated tree. The oak once held a place in English hearts, but who now reveres it?—our trust is in gods of iron. Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable? One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others—the minted round of metal. And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.

John Crome (1768-1821), The Poringland Oak

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II (Act V, Scene 1):

I will not excuse you; you shall not be excused; excuses shall not be admitted; there is no excuse shall serve; you shall not be excused.

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Winter, XXV):

For me, it is a virtue to be self-centred; I am much better employed, from every point of view, when I live solely for my own satisfaction, than when I begin to worry about the world....Living as I do now, I deserve better of my country than at any time in my working life; better, I suspect, than most of those who are praised for busy patriotism.

Not that I regard my life as an example for any one else; all I say is, that it is good for me, and in so far an advantage to the world. To live in quiet content is surely a piece of good citizenship.

George Gissing (1857-1903), letter to his sister Ellen (August 2, 1885):

Let us think: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides among the Greeks: Virgil, Catullus, Horace, among the Latins: in Italian, Dante and Boccaccio: in Spanish, Don Quixote: in German, Goethe, Jean Paul, Heine: in French, Molière, George Sand, Balzac, De Musset: in English, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Browning and Scott. These are the indispensables. I rejoice to say I can read them all in the original, except Cervantes, and I hope to take up Spanish next year, just for that purpose.

William Stott (1857–1900), CMS Reading by Gaslight
Related posts:

• Reading List (John Cheke)
  
• Another Reading List (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
  
• Reading List (Thomas Jefferson)
  
• Light Reading (Thomas Babington Macaulay)

Alexander McCall Smith, Portuguese Irregular Verbs (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2003; rpt. New York: Anchor Books, 2005), p. 36:

Von Igelfeld looked out of the window. Little droplets of rain coursed across the glass and made the countryside quiver. He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands. How sad it was that the language had been so largely lost; that it should survive only in these small pockets of the countryside. This was happening everywhere. The crudities of the modern world were simplifying or even destroying linguistic subtleties. Irregular verbs were becoming regular, the imperfect subjunctive was becoming the present subjunctive or, more frequently, disappearing altogether. Where previously there might have been four adjectives to describe a favoured hill, or the scent of new-mown hay, or the action of threading the warp of a loom, now there would only be one, or none. And as we lost the words, von Igelfeld thought, we lost the texture of the world.

Note the pun in "phlegmish lowlands."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, Book I (tr. Barbara Foxley):

Men are not made to be crowded together in ant-hills, but scattered over the earth to till it. The more they are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of over-crowded cities. Of all creatures man is least fitted to live in herds. Huddled together like sheep, men would very soon die. Man's breath is fatal to his fellows. This is literally as well as figuratively true.

Les hommes ne sont point faits pour être entassés en fourmilières, mais épars sur la terre qu'ils doivent cultiver. Plus ils se rassemblent, plus ils se corrompent. Les infirmités du corps, ainsi que les vices de l'âme, sont l'infaillible effet de ce concours trop nombreux. L'homme est de tous les animaux celui qui peut le moins vivre en troupeaux. Des hommes entassés comme des moutons périraient tous en très-peu de temps. L'haleine de l'homme est mortelle à ses semblables: cela n'est pas moins vrai au propre qu'au figuré.

Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Oeuvres Choisies, I (Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1866), p. 14 (my translation):

If someone had said to Adam, the day after Abel's death, that in a few centuries there would be places where, within the space of four square leagues, there would be found joined and crammed together seven or eight hundred thousand men, would he have believed that these crowds could ever live together? Would he not have had an even more horrible idea of crimes and monstrosities than what is actually perpetrated there? This is the thought that we must keep in mind in order to console ourselves for the evils attendant on such amazing agglomerations of men.

Si l'on avoit dit à Adam, le lendemain de la mort d'Abel, que dans quelques siècles il y auroit des endroits où, dans l'enceinte de quatre lieues carrées, se trouveroient réunis et amoncelés sept ou huit cent mille hommes, auroit-il cru que ces multitudes pussent jamais vivre ensemble? Ne se seroit-il pas fait une idée encore plus affreuse de ce qui s'y commet de crimes et de monstruosités? C'est la réflexion qu'il faut faire pour se consoler des abus attachés à ces étonnantes réunions d'hommes.

Id., p. 18 (my translation):

Men shrink when they gather together in a crowd: they are Milton's devils, compelled to turn themselves into pygmies in order to enter into Pandemonium.

Les hommes deviennent petits en se rassemblant: ce sont les diables de Milton, obligés de se rendre pygmées, pour entrer dans le pandaemonion.

Chamfort is referring to Paradise Lost, 1.777-781:

Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed
In bigness to surpass Earth's giant sons,
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Throng numberless—like that pygmean race
Beyond the Indian mount...

Will Broadhead, "Colonization, Land Distribution, and Veteran Settlement," in Paul Erdkamp, ed., A Companion to the Roman Army (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 148-163 (at 161):

Traditional colonization began with ager publicus, land confiscated from Rome's defeated enemies or rebellious allies. The land expropriated by the triumvirs for the settlement of 41 was nothing of the kind. The 18 towns chosen for the confiscations were Roman towns, whose Roman citizens would suffer from the arbitrary judgment of the triumvirs. The towns had committed no crime, displayed no particular disloyalty; they were chosen simply for their wealth and the quality of their fields and houses....The 18 towns whose land was distributed to veterans in 41 were offered as a reward, dangled before the soldiers as payment for what consequently amounted to mercenary service under the triumvirs.

This is the background behind Vergil's first Eclogue, in which Tityrus wins an exemption from Octavian (one of the triumvirs) and saves his land from confiscation.

It is probably also the historical background of a poem attributed to Vergil, the Dirae (Curses), in which the speaker curses his own confiscated land, in the bitter hope that it will bring no pleasure or profit to the veteran to whom it was assigned. The dispossessed farmer grieves that the veteran will cut down the trees on his land, and also prays that the resulting timber will go up in flames before the veteran can use it (lines 26-36, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

O thou best of woods, oft sung in our playful songs and verses, thou beauteous in thy wealth of green, thou shalt shear thy green shade: neither shalt thou boast of thy soft boughs' joyous leafage, as the breezes blow among them, nor, O Battarus, shall it oft resound for me with my song. When with his axe the soldier's impious hand shall fell it, and the lovely shadows fall, thyself, more lovely than they, shalt fall, the old owner's happy timber. Yet all for naught! Rather, accursed by our verses, thou shalt burn with heaven's fires. O Jupiter ('twas Jupiter himself nurtured this wood), this must thou turn into ashes!

Lusibus et nostris multum cantata libellis
optima silvarum, formosis densa virectis,
tondebis viridis umbras: nec laeta comantis
iactabis mollis ramos inflantibus auris,
nec mihi saepe meum resonabit, Battare, carmen.   30
militis impia cum succidet dextera ferro
formosaeque cadent umbrae, formosior illis
ipsa cades, veteris domini felicia ligna.
nequiquam! nostris potius devota libellis,
ignibus aetheriis flagrabis. Iuppiter (ipse   35
Iuppiter hanc aluit), cinis haec tibi fiat oportet.

Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), Der Holzfäller

Labels: arboricide

Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia 192 (tr. Christopher Maurer):

A peaceable person is a long-lived one. To live, let live. Peaceable people not only live, they reign. Listen and see, but keep quiet. A day without contention means a night of rest. To live much and to take pleasure in life is to live twice: the fruit of peace. You can have everything if you care little for what matters nothing. Nothing is sillier than to take everything seriously. It is just as foolish to let something wound you when it doesn't concern you as not to be wounded when it does.

Hombre de gran paz, hombre de mucha vida. Para vivir, dejar vivir. No sólo viven los pacíficos, sino que reinan. Hase de oír y ver, pero callar. El día sin pleito hace la noche soñolienta. Vivir mucho y vivir con gusto es vivir por dos, y fruto de la paz. Todo lo tiene a quien no se le da nada de lo que no le importa. No hay mayor despropósito que tomarlo todo de propósito. Igual necedad que le passe el corazón a quien no le toca, y que no le entre de los dientes adentro a quien le importa.

Richard Chenevix Trench, On the Study of Words, 18th ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1882), pp. 143-144 (Lecture IV):

Certain theologians in the Middle Ages were termed Schoolmen; having been formed and trained in the cloister and cathedral schools which Charlemagne and his immediate successors had founded. These were men not to be lightly spoken of, as they often are by those who never read a line of their works, and have not a thousandth part of their wit; who moreover little guess how many of the most familiar words which they employ, or misemploy, have descended to them from these. 'Real,' 'virtual,' 'entity,' 'nonentity,' 'equivocation,' 'objective,' 'subjective,' with many more unknown to classical Latin, but now almost necessities to us, were first coined by the Schoolmen; and, passing over from them into the speech of others more or less interested in their speculations, have gradually filtered through the successive strata of society, till now some of them have reached to quite the lowest.

Walter Pope (1628-1714), The Old Man's Wish:

If I live to grow old (for I find I go down),
Let this be my fate in a Country Town;
Let me have a warm house, with a stone at the gate,
And a cleanly young girl to rub my bald pate:
  May I govern my passion with an absolute sway,
  And grow wiser and better, as my strength wears away,
  Without gout or stone, by a gentle decay.

In a Country Town, by a murmuring brook,
The ocean at distance, on which I may look;
With a spacious plain, without hedge or stile,
And an easy pad-nagg to ride out a mile:
  May I govern my passion, etc.

With a pudding on Sunday, and stout humming liquor,
And remnants of Latine to puzzle the Vicar;
With a hidden reserve of Burgundy-wine
To drink the King's health as oft as I dine:
  May I govern my passion, etc.

With Plutarch, and Horace, and one or two more
Of the best Wits that liv'd in the ages before;
With a dish of roast mutton, not venison nor teal,
And clean (tho' coarse) linnen at every meal:
  May I govern my passion, etc.

And if I should have Guests, I must add to my wish,
On Fridays a mess of good buttered fish;
For full well I do know, and the truth I reveal,
I had better do so than come short of a meal:
  May I govern my passion, etc.

With breeches and jerkin of good country gray,
And live without working, now my strength doth decay;
With a hog's-head of Sherry, for to drink when I please,
With Friends to be merry, and to live at my ease;
  May I govern my passion, etc.

Without molestation may I spend my last days
In sweet recreation, and sound forth the praise
Of all those that are true to the King and his Laws,
Since it be their due, they shall have my applause:
  May I govern my passion, etc.

When the days are grown short, and it freezes and snows,
May I have a Coal-fire as high as my nose;
A fire which (once stirr'd up with a prong)
Will keep the Room temperate all the night long.
  May I govern my passion, etc.

With courage undaunted may I face my last Day;
And when I am dead, may the better sort say,
"In the morning when sober, in the evening when mellow,
He is gone, and has left not behind him his Fellow.
  For he governed his passion with an absolute sway,
  And grew wiser and better, as his strength wore away,
  Without gout or stone, by a gentle decay."

Charles Spencelayh, Morning Chapter

Wallace Stevens, The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Van Gogh, Farmer Sitting at the Fireside, Reading
Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland:

But it must be remembered, that life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments; the greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures; and we are well or ill at ease, as the main stream of life glides on smoothly, or is ruffled by small obstacles and frequent interruption.

Peter Green, Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989; rpt. 1998), p. 270 (footnote omitted):

But as a lifelong student of Greek and Latin I beseech all those who can, by hook or crook, make the effort, to beat the curse of Babel by mastering the languages in which two of the greatest, and most influential, literatures the world has ever known are written, and by so doing to break free from the tyranny imposed by their own culture. 'For even'—to quote Ascham again—'as a hauke flieth not hie with one wing: even so a man reacheth not to excellency with one tong.' This is a hard investment; but once made, it will reward the investor a thousandfold, until his dying day.

Ozias Leduc, The Young Student

Nicholas Breton (1545?-1626?), Fantasticks (September), from The Works in Verse and Prose of Nicholas Breton, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, Vol. II: Prose (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1879):

It is now September, and the Sunne begins to fall much from his height, the medowes are left bare, by the mouthes of hungry Cattell, and the Hogges are turned into the Corne fields: the windes begin to knocke the Apples heads together on the trees, and the fallings are gathered to fill the Pyes for the Household: the Saylers fall to worke to get afore the winde, and if they spy a storme, it puts them to prayer: the Souldier now begins to shrug at the weather, and the Campe dissolved, the Companie are put to Garison: the Lawyer now begins his Harvest, and the Client payes for words by waight: the Innes now begin to provide for ghests, and the night-eaters in the stable, pinch the Travailer in his bed: Paper, pen, and inke are much in request, and the quarter Sessions take order with the way-layers: Coales and wood make toward the Chimney, and Ale and Sacke are in account with good fellowes: the Butcher now knocks downe the great Beeves, and the Poulters feathers make toward the Upholster: Walflet Oysters are the Fish wives wealth, and Pippins are the Costermongers rich merchandise: the flayle and the fan fall to worke in the Barne, and the Corne market is full of the Bakers: the Porkets now are driven to the Woods, and the home-fed Pigges make porke for the market. In briefe, I thus conclude of it, I hold it the Winters forewarning, and the Summers farewell. Adieu.

Levi Wells Prentice, Apples Under a Tree
Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1950; rpt. New York: Avenel Books, 1981), p. 537:

How many bookmen have wished a favourite book to go with them into oblivion I have no means of knowing, but that there are many I have no doubt: among them, certainly, is Sir Thomas Browne, who expressed such a wish in his will: On my coffin when in the grave I desire may be deposited in its leather case or coffin my Elzevir's Horace, 'Comes Viae Vitaeque dulcis et utilis', worn out with and by me.<sup>3

3</sup>Qt., Life of Osler. Cushing. ii, 681.

For the love I bear to Horace and Sir Thomas Browne, I wish this anecdote were true, but it isn't, at least not entirely.

Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), is unavailable to me, but from a snippet view in Google Books it appears that Osler referred to Sir William Browne (1692-1774), not Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682). See "Will of Sir William Browne, Knight, M.D., dated 11 February, 1772," in John Willis Clark, Endowments of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: The University Press, 1904), pp. 98-101 (at 98):

On my Coffin, when in the Grave, I desire may be deposited in its Leather Case or Coffin my Pocket-Elzivir-Horace comes viae vitaeque dulcis et utilis, worn out with, and by me.

Title Page of Elzevir Horace

---

Update: Thanks to Eric Thomson for sending me the following excerpt from [William Warburton], Letters from a Late Eminent Prelate to One of his Friends, 2nd ed. (London. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809), pp.404-405 (Letter CXCIX, Prior-Park, November 8, 1767):

When you see Dr. Heberden, pray communicate to him an unexpected honour I have lately received. The other day, word was brought me from below, that one Sir William Browne sent up his name, and should be glad to kiss my hand. I judged it to be the famous Physician, whom I had never seen, nor had the honour to know. When I came down into the drawing-room, I was accosted by a little, round, well-fed gentleman, with a large muff in one hand, a small Horace, open, in the other, and a spying glass dangling in a black ribbon at his button.

After the first salutation, he informed me that his visit was indeed to me; but principally, and in the first place, to Prior-Park, which had so inviting a prospect from below; and he did not doubt but, on examination, it would sufficiently repay the trouble he had given himself of coming up to it on foot. We then took our chairs; and the first thing he did or said, was to propose a doubt to me concerning a passage in Horace, which all this time he had still open in his hand. Before I could answer, he gave me the solution of this long misunderstood passage: and, in support of his explanation, had the charity to repeat his own paraphrase of it, in English verse, just come hot, as he said, from the brain. When this and chocolate were over, having seen all he wanted of me, he desired to see something more of the seat; and particularly what he called the monument, by which I understood him to mean, the Prior's tower, with your inscription. Accordingly I ordered a servant to attend him thither; and, when he had satisfied his curiosity, either to let him out from the park above into the down, or from the garden below into the road. Which he chose, I never asked; and so this honourable visit ended. Hereby you will understand that the design of all this was, to be admired. And, indeed, he had my admiration to the full; but for nothing so much, as for his being able, at past eighty, to perform this expedition on foot, in no good weather, and with all the alacrity of a boy, both in body and mind.

Related post: Funeral of a Lover of Horace.

Labels: typographical and other errors

Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992; rpt. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), pp. 210-211:

Entomologists are often asked whether insects will take over if the human race extinguishes itself. This is an example of a wrong question inviting an irrelevant answer: insects have already taken over. They originated on the land 400 million years ago. By Carboniferous times, 100 million years later, they had radiated into forms nearly as diverse as those existing today. They have dominated terrestrial and freshwater habitats around the world ever since. They easily survived the great extinction spasm at the end of the Paleozoic era, when life survived more than the equivalent of a total nuclear war. Today about a billion billion insects are alive at any given time around the world. At nearest order of magnitude, this amounts to a trillion kilograms of living matter, somewhat more than the weight of humanity. Their species, most of which lack a scientific name, number into the millions. The human race is a newcomer dwelling among the six-legged masses, less than two million years old, with a tenuous grip on the planet. Insects can thrive without us, but we and most other land organisms would perish without them.