Laudator Temporis Acti

"Qui gravis es nimium, potes hinc iam, lector, abire / quo libet" (Martial 11.16.1-2). In other words, warning — this post contains scatological content.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Epitaph on the Learned Robert Whitmore, Esqre, Who Died of a Diarrhoea, 4 August 1812, Aetatis Suae 57:

Here lies learned Whitmore!
He'll never shit more,
No, not a bit more,
Learned Robert Whitmore!

Epicurus, Vatican Collection 14, text from Hermann Usener, "Epikurische Spruchsammlung," in his Kleine Schriften I (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1912), pp. 297-325 (at 314), tr. Cyril Bailey in Whitney J. Oates, ed., The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers (New York: Random House, 1940), p. 40:

We are born once and cannot be born twice, but for all time must be no more. But you, who are not master of to-morrow, postpone your happiness: life is wasted in procrastination and each one of us dies without allowing himself leisure.

Γεγόναμεν ἅπαξ, δὶς δὲ οὐκ ἔστι γενέσθαι· δεῖ δὲ τὸν αἰῶνα μηκέτι εἶναι· σὺ δὲ οὐκ ὢν τῆς αὔριον <κύριος> ἀναβάλλῃ τὸ χαῖρον· ὁ δὲ βίος μελλησμῷ παραπόλλυται καὶ εἷς ἕκαστος ἡμῶν ἀσχολούμενος ἀποθνῄσκει.

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Martial 5.58:

You say you'll live tomorrow, Postumus, always tomorrow: tell me, Postumus, when does that tomorrow of yours arrive? How far away that tomorrow of yours is! Where is it? Or whence is it to be sought? Is it hiding among the Parthians and Armenians? That tomorrow of yours is already as old as Priam or Nestor. That tomorrow of yours, tell me, for how much could it be purchased? You'll live tomorrow? It's too late to live even today, Postumus: the wise man is the one who lived yesterday.

Cras te victurum, cras dicis, Postume, semper:
  dic mihi, cras istud, Postume, quando venit?
Quam longe cras istud! ubi est? aut unde petendum?
  Numquid apud Parthos Armeniosque latet?
Iam cras istud habet Priami vel Nestoris annos.
  Cras istud quanti, dic mihi, possit emi?
Cras vives? Hodie iam vivere, Postume, serum est:
  ille sapit quisquis, Postume, vixit heri.

Note the insistent repetition of cras = tomorrow, which we also see embedded like a fossil in the English word procrastination.

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Buson, from New Flower Picking (Shin Hanatsumi), tr. Yuki Sawa and Edith M. Shiffert:

What you want to acquire, you should acquire by any means. What you want to see, even though it is with difficulty, you should see. You should not let it pass, thinking there will be another chance to see it or acquire it. It is quite unusual to have a second chance to materialize your desire.

Thanks to R.E. Mason for sending me a copy of H.L. Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor, ed. Jonathan Yardley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), which I much enjoyed reading. Here are some excerpts and notes:

p. xviii:

My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between that other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even to be malicious.

p. xix:

I wrote what I wrote because it was in my nature to do so, and for no other reason. As I have often observed, my fundamental satisfaction was indistinguished from the satisfaction that a hen enjoys in laying an egg.

pp. 5-6:

I am convinced that writing verse is the best of all preparations for writing prose. It makes the neophyte look sharply to his words, and improves that sense of rhythm and tone-color—in brief, that sense of music—which is at the bottom of all sound prose, just as it is at the bottom of all sound verse.

p. 8 (term "lemon-squeezer" used of publisher who prints books at the expense of their authors)

p. 16 (of Dvorak):

Later, when he moved on to one of the Czech colonies in the upper Middle East, it was not the low state of civilization there that made him unhappy, but the lack of decent Manhattans.

Surely this is an error for "upper Middle West," as the colony in question was Spillville, Iowa.

p. 17:

Yet another of Huneker's tales was the death of Walt Whitman. He got it, he said, from Horace Traubel, who was Whitman's amanuensis and valet. Old Walt's last moments were at hand, with Horace in attendance upon him at the little house in Camden, N.J. Finally, the dying poet whispered: "Lift me up, Horace; I want to shit." These, according to Huneker, were his authentic last words.

p. 41:

I took no notice of it, for I had already begun to believe that it was vain to engage in defensive operations. Anyone who felt aggrieved was free, so far as I was concerned, to revile me all he pleased; the one thing I asked was liberty to expose and expound my own ideas.

p. 65 (from letter of Mencken to Ezra Pound):

You made your great mistake when you abandoned the poetry business, and set up shop as a wizard in general practice. You wrote, in your day, some very good verse, and I had the pleasure, along with other literary buzzards, of calling attention to it at the time. But when you fell into the hands of those London logrollers, and began to wander through pink fogs with them, all your native common sense oozed out of you, and you set up a caterwauling for all sorts of brummagem Utopias, at first in the aesthetic region only but later in the regions of political and aesthetic baloney. Thus a competent poet was spoiled to make a tinhorn politician.

p. 86 (on Eltinge F. Warner):

He was extraordinarily ignorant of everything save sports, and once astounded us by asking us the meaning of psychology. He had found the word in the Smart Set, and said that it had puzzled him: he pronounced it pissicology.

pp. 99-100 (praise of poet Robert Loveman of Dalton, Georgia)

p. 170:

I had become convinced early in my newspaper days, and even before, that the distinguishing mark of the normal Americano was his essentially moral view of the world, his tendency to color all values with concepts of rightness and wrongness, his inability to throw off the Puritan obsession with sin.

pp. 190-191 (article "Si Mutare Potest Aethiops Pellum Suam," occurs twice, should of course be pellem, not pellum, from Vulgate of Jeremiah 13:23)

p. 249:

I had already acquired, in those days, the habit of making a note whenever anything interesting occurred to me, and these notes, in the years to come, were destined to run to immense numbers. Many of them, of course, were consumed by my newspaper and magazine articles and my books, but there was always a surplus, and early in 1945 I resolved to go through it critically, throw away all the useless stuff, and reduce the rest to coherent terms, for not a few of the notes were confined to reminders of a few words, unintelligible to anyone save myself. Indeed, when I settled down to work upon them I found that some were baffling to me as well. When I finished the job I had enough material to fill four letter-files.

pp. 285-287 (Mencken's hobby of bricklaying)

p. 294 (word "plupatriot")

p. 302 (collected attacks on him in Menckeniana: A Schimpflexikon)

p. 321:

That was always my principal aim—to stand aloof from the general, and to make plain as dramatically. as possible my differences from and contempt for the general.

p. 380 (cartoonist William Gropper)

p. 391 (a useful ploy to spur lazy correspondents):

In September, not having heard from him for two months, I sent a letter to his postoffice box, addressed to "The Executor of the Estate of the Late Theodore Herman Dreiser, Deceased," and inquiring what his last words had been.

Eric Thomson writes:

I thought you'd like these two extracts on oak trees, written within eight years of each other:

Diary of the Reverend Francis Kilvert (Saturday, April 22nd 1876):

As we came down the lower slopes of the wooded hillside into the glades of the park the herds of deer were moving under the brown oaks and the brilliant green hawthorns, and we came upon the largest stateliest ash I ever saw and what seemed at first in the dusk to be a great ruined tower, but which proved to be the vast ruin of the king oak of Moccas Park, hollow and broken but still alive and vigorous in parts and actually pushing out new shoots and branches . That tree may be 2000 years old. It measured roughly 33 feet round by arm stretching.

I fear those old men of Moccas, those grey, gnarled, low-browed, knock-kneed, bowed, bent, huge, strange, long-armed, deformed, hunchbacked misshapen oak men that stand waiting and watching century after century biding God's time with both feet in the grave and yet tiring down and seeing out generation after generation, with such tales to tell, as when they whisper them to each other in the midsummer nights, make the silver birches weep and the poplars and aspens shiver and the long ears of the hares and rabbits stand on end. No human hand set these oaks. They are 'the trees which the Lord hath planted'. They look as if they had been at the beginning and making of the world, and they will probably see its end.

From 'Los Robles' in 'Las Orillas del Sar' (1884) by Galician poet Rosalía de Castro (1837-85):

Bajo el hacha implacable, ¡cuán presto
en tierra cayeron
encinas y robles!;
y a los rayos del alba risueña,
¡qué calva aparece
la cima del monte!

Los que ayer fueron bosques y selvas
de agreste espesura,
donde envueltas en dulce misterio
al rayar el día
flotaban las brumas,
y brotaba la fuente serena
entre flores y musgos oculta,
hoy son áridas lomas que ostentan
deformes y negras
sus hondas cisuras.

Beneath the implacable axe, how quickly the evergreens and the oaks fell to earth! And in the rays of the bright dawn, how bald now is the mountaintop!

What were yesterday woods and forests of rugged denseness, where enveloped in sweet mystery at break of day the mists floated and the spring rose serene, hidden among flowers and mosses, today are arid hillocks which, black and deformed, reveal their deep crevices.

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Back in propria persona, those lines from Rosalía de Castro seem to me to be poetry of a high order, although my inadequate grasp of Spanish doesn't permit me to appreciate them fully. On the other hand, the following poem by Amy Levy (1861–1889), The Birch-Tree at Loschwitz, from A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889), p. 40, doesn't strike me as very distinguished verse, but it did attract my notice for its description of tree-hugging:

At Loschwitz above the city
  The air is sunny and chill;
The birch-trees and the pine-trees
  Grow thick upon the hill.

Lone and tall, with silver stem,
  A birch-tree stands apart;
The passionate wind of spring-time
  Stirs in its leafy heart.

I lean against the birch-tree,
  My arms around it twine;
It pulses, and leaps, and quivers,
  Like a human heart to mine.

One moment I stand, then sudden
  Let loose mine arms that cling:
O God! the lonely hillside,
  The passionate wind of spring!

Isaak Levitan, Birch Grove

Labels: arboricide

Abel Grimmer (1570-1619), Winter Landscape with Peasants Chopping Wood:

Labels: arboricide

Geert Roskam, Live Unnoticed (Λάθε βιώσας): On the Vicissitudes of an Epicurean Doctrine (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. 145:

Nicomedia, May 1, 305 A.D. Diocletian of his own free will abdicates in the presence of the army, and withdraws as a private citizen to Salona (Lactantius, mort. pers. 19). Three years later, Herculius and Galerius try to convince him to reassume the office of emperor. His reaction to the proposal has been preserved in Aurelius Victor: "If only you could see at Salona the vegetables I have cultivated with my own hands, you would undoubtedly never have decided to make this attempt" (epit. 39,6), after which, one presumes, he resumed his life as a private citizen in perfect tranquillity.

Aurelius Victor, Epitome 39.6 (tr. Thomas M. Banich):

It was he who, when solicited by Herculius and Galerius for the purpose of resuming control, responded in this way, as though avoiding some kind of plague: "If you could see at Salonae the cabbages raised by our hands, you surely would never judge that a temptation."

Qui dum ab Herculio atque Galerio ad recipiendum imperium rogaretur, tamquam pestem aliquam detestans in hunc modum respondit: "Utinam Salonae possetis visere olera nostris manibus instituta, profecto numquam istud temptandum iudicaretis".

"I was determined to know beans" (Thoreau)
My son, with beans from his garden
More beans
Beans shelled and dried

Charles Lamb, in his essay on Imperfect Sympathies, quotes these lines from Heywood's Hierarchie of Angels (1635):

—We by proof find there should be
'Twixt man and man such an antipathy,
That though he can show no just reason why
For any former wrong or injury,
Can neither find a blemish in his fame,
Nor aught in face or feature justly blame,
Can challenge or accuse him of no evil,
Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil.

In seventeenth century Oxford, a wayward student named Tom Brown (1663–1704) was on the verge of being expelled, when John Fell (1625-1686, Dean of Christ Church and Bishop of Oxford) offered him a pardon, on the condition that Tom translate on the spot a Latin epigram by Martial (1.33). Here is Tom's bold, extemporaneous translation:

I do not love thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this alone I know full well,
I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.

And here is Martial's original couplet:

Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare;
  Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te.

L.W. King, ed., Bronze Reliefs from the Gates of Shalmaneser, King of Assyria, B.C. 860-825 (London: British Museum, 1915), Plate VIII, Band II.2 (Campaign in Armenia, 860 B.C.), Upper Register (Burning of a city of Urartu and cutting down of its date-plantations), Lower Register (Assyrian chariots and archers at the storming of a city of Urartu):


Look at the upper left hand part of the relief to see the tree-cutting.

Labels: arboricide

The London Magazine: or, Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer (1733), pp. 264-265 (May 6):

This Night was buried at Whittlesea, Mr. John Underwood, of Nassington; of whose Funeral we had the following odd Account from Whittlesea, viz. He was brought to the Grave at Five, and as soon as the Burial Service was over, an Arch was turned over the Coffin, in which was placed, over his Breast, a small Piece of white Marble, with this Inscription, Non omnis moriar, J. Underwood, 1733. When the Grave was filled up, and the Turf laid down, the six Gentlemen who followed him to the Grave sung the last Stanza of the 20th Ode of the 2d Book of Horace: Every Thing was done according to his Desire; no Bell was toll'd, no one was invited, but the six Gentlemen, and no Relation follow'd his Corpse; the Coffin was painted Green, according to his Direction, and he was laid in it with all his Cloaths on; under his Head was placed Sanadon's Horace, at his Feet Bentley's Milton; in his right Hand a small Greek Testament, with this Inscription in Golden Letters, εἴ μὴ ἐν τῷ σταυρῷ, J. U. in left Hand a little Edition of Horace, with this Inscription, Musis Amicus, J.U. and Bentley's Horace under his Arse. After the Ceremony was over they went back to his House, where his Sister had provided a very handsome cold Supper; the Cloth being taken away, the Gentlemen sung the 31st Ode of the 1st Book of Horace, and drank a chearful Glass, and went home about Eight. He left near 6000 l. to his Sister, upon Condition of her observing this his Will. He order'd his Sister, to give each of the Gentlemen ten Guineas, and desired that they would not come in black Cloaths. Then follows a Direction about his Burial, as above; and the Will ends thus — which done, I would have them take a chearful Glass, and think no more of John Underwood.

I owe knowledge of Underwood's funeral to Penelope Wilson, "Horace and eighteenth century commentary," in L.B.T. Houghton and Maria Wyke, Perceptions of Horace: A Roman Poet and His Readers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 271-289 (at 276, with n. 10), who quotes only a bit of an account from The London Evening Post no. 849, 8-10 May 1733.

The Greek εἴ μὴ ἐν τῷ σταυρῷ is from Galatians 6:14, "But God forbid that I should boast, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ..." The inscription Non omnis moriar ("I shall not completely die") is from Horace, Odes 3.30.6, and Musis amicus ("A friend to the Muses") is the opening of Horace, Odes 1.26. The last stanza of Horace, Odes 2.20, sung at the graveside, is:

absint inani funere neniae
    luctusque turpes et querimoniae;
        compesce clamorem ac sepulcri
        mitte supervacuos honores.

In John Conington's translation:

No dirges for my fancied death;
  No weak lament, no mournful stave;
All clamorous grief were waste of breath,
  And vain the tribute of a grave.

Horace, Odes 1.31, sung after the funeral, starts Quid dedicatum poscit Apollinem — a somewhat odd choice, as I would have expected one of the convivial odes, not a hymn to Apollo, to precede "a chearful Glass". The hostility to Richard Bentley is noteworthy ("at his Feet Bentley's Milton" and "Bentley's Horace under his Arse").

Horace, Odes 1.31.17-20 (tr. Niall Rudd):

Grant, o son of Latona, that I may enjoy what I possess—in good health, I pray you, and with full mental vigour; and may I have an old age that is not lacking in dignity or bereft of music.

frui paratis et valido mihi,
Latoe, dones, et, precor, integra
    cum mente, nec turpem senectam
        degere nec cithara carentem.

Edward Thomas, Horae Solitariae (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1902), p. 16:

When I speak a line of Greek I seem to taste nectar and ambrosia.

E.K. Rand, letter to James B. Conant (April 1935), quoted in Arthur F. Stocker, "Edward Kennard Rand," The American Scholar 52 (1983) 89-97 (at 94):

As for publication, we should cease to regard it as a major criterion of scholarship. It is true that an inquiring and original mind—which is, of course, a prime essential—cannot help making fresh observations and fruitful discoveries, but it matters not whether he disseminates them on paper or in the intellects of his pupils. The latter way is "productive scholarship" combined with art. If a paper or a book is the outcome of his thought, well and good. If he prefers to wait till his thoughts mellow, all the better. If he never publishes at all, that is not necessarily against him. The possession of a keen and original mind can be told in a half hour's conversation. It is also easy to find out within a few years whether the possessor of such a mind is constantly improving it, or whether he is content with his own brilliance and the modicum of information necessary for his task. In the Classics, I should rate higher that scholar who has made friends with the great authors of Greece and Rome, who steadily deepens his intimacy with them, and who can inspire his pupils with an eagerness to make the same friendship with them.

G.P. Goold, "Richard Bentley: A Tercentenary Commemoration," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 67 (1963) 285-302 (at 296):

The greatest book written in Greek is the New Testament, though a Chinese who studied Greek in the classics departments of Occidental universities might well become an old man without ever discovering the fact.

Logan Pearsall Smith, Mammon (from Trivia):

Moralists and Church Fathers have named it the root of all Evil, the begetter of hate and bloodshed, the sure cause of the soul's damnation. It has been called 'trash,' 'muck,' 'dunghill excrement,' by grave authors. The love of it is denounced in all Sacred Writings; we find it reprehended on Chaldean bricks, and in the earliest papyri. Buddha, Confucius, Christ, set their faces against it; and they have been followed in more modern times by beneficed Clergymen, Sunday School Teachers, and the leaders of the Higher Thought. But have the condemnations of all the ages done anything to tarnish that bright lustre? Men dig for it ever deeper into the earth's intestines, travel in search of it farther and farther to arctic and unpleasant regions.

In spite of all my moral reading, I must confess that I like to have some of this gaudy substance in my pocket. Its presence cheers and comforts me, diffuses a genial warmth through my body. My eyes rejoice in the shine of it; its clinquant sound is music in my ears. Since I then am in his paid service, and reject none of the doles of his bounty, I too dwell in the House of Mammon. I bow before the Idol, and taste the unhallowed ecstasy.

How many Altars have been overthrown, and how many Theologies and heavenly Dreams have had their bottoms knocked out of them, while He has sat there, a great God, golden and adorned, and secure on His unmoved throne?

Related post: The Worship of Mammon.

Arthur F. Stocker, "Edward Kennard Rand," The American Scholar 52 (1983) 89-97 (at 93):

In the phrontisteria of this world, as in Heaven, there are many mansions. In some dwell the discoverers of great truths hitherto unknown or unrecognized, in others live the miners of data, who gather and sort diverse bits of new information that become building blocks out of which the edifices of the future can later be constructed.

Excerpts from John Stuart Mill, On Liberty:

Chapter I (Introductory):

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

....

There is, in fact, no recognized principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government interference is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal preferences. Some, whenever they see any good to be done, or evil to be remedied, would willingly instigate the government to undertake the business; while others prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil, rather than add one to the departments of human interests amenable to governmental control. And men range themselves on one or the other side in any particular case, according to this general direction of their sentiments; or according to the degree of interest which they feel in the particular thing which it is proposed that the government should do; or according to the belief they entertain that the government would, or would not, do it in the manner they prefer; but very rarely on account of any opinion to which they consistently adhere, as to what things are fit to be done by a government. And it seems to me that, in consequence of this absence of rule or principle, one side is at present as often wrong as the other; the interference of government is, with about equal frequency, improperly invoked and improperly condemned.

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The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

Chapter II (On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion):

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

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Yet it is as evident in itself as any amount of argument can make it, that ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.

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In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. The steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it: for, being cognizant of all that can, at least obviously, be said against him, and having taken up his position against all gainsayers knowing that he has sought for objections and difficulties, instead of avoiding them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the subject from any quarter — he has a right to think his judgment better than that of any person, or any multitude, who have not gone through a similar process.

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...that very frequent infirmity of English minds, which makes them take a preposterous pleasure in the assertion of a bad principle, when they are no longer bad enough to desire to carry it really into practice.

....

In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life; until the one or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away. Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.

....

Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.

Chapter III (Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being):

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

....

In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual, or the family, do not ask themselves — what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature?

....

In some such insidious form there is at present a strong tendency to this narrow theory of life, and to the pinched and hidebound type of human character which it patronizes. Many persons, no doubt, sincerely think that human beings thus cramped and dwarfed, are as their Maker designed them to be; just as many have thought that trees are a much finer thing when clipped into pollards, or cut out into figures of animals, than as nature made them. But if it be any part of religion to believe that man was made by a good Being, it is more consistent with that faith to believe, that this Being gave all human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded, not rooted out and consumed, and that he takes delight in every nearer approach made by his creatures to the ideal conception embodied in them, every increase in any of their capabilities of comprehension, of action, or of enjoyment.

....

In sober truth, whatever homage may be professed, or even paid, to real or supposed mental superiority, the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.

....

Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

Chapter IV (Of the Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual):

There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a religious bigot, when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their abominable worship or creed. But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it. And a person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.

Amalar of Metz, Missae Expositionis Geminus Codex, first paragraph of Codex I, quoted by Eleanor Shipley Duckett, Carolingian Portraits: A Study in the Ninth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962; rpt. 1988), p. 98:

If any reader of this work of mine suffers nausea as he gets to the end, he is not to blame me, but himself. Before he ever began to read it, he knew quite well how little renown I have for scholarship, and it is only his fault if he has stuck to it until the last page.

The Latin is probably in Jean Michel Hanssen, ed., Amalari Episcopi Opera Liturgica Omnia, 3 vols. (Rome: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, 1948-1950 = Studi e Testi, 138-140), which is unavailable to me.

Greek Anthology 9.43 (Parmenion of Macedonia, tr. W.R. Paton):

The simple covering of my cloak is enough for me; and I, who feed on the flowers of the Muses, shall never be the slave of the table. I hate witless wealth, the nurse of flatterers, and I will not stand in attendance on one who looks down on me. I know the freedom of scanty fare.

The same, tr. Peter Jay in The Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Greek Epigrams: A Selection in Modern Verse Translations (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 237:

The protection of a cheap coat suffices. I
Who graze on the Muses' flowers, will not be slave
To any table. I hate wealth's inanity,
The hot-bed of hangers-on. I wait
On no one's frown, I know
A meagre diet's freedom.

The same, tr. Florent Chrestien in Epigrammata ex Libris Graecae Anthologiae (Lutetiae: Ex Typographia Roberti Stephani, 1608), folio 5 verso:

Sat mihi sat vilis laena est; servire recuso
  Mensis, Musarum munere donec alar.
Odi assentantes & opes sine mente superbas:
  Libertas coenae me iuvat exiguae.

The same, tr. Hugo Grotius:

Sat mihi palliolum pro tegmine: non ego mensis
  Servio, qui pascor floribus Aonidum.
Triste & adulantes & nutus triste potentum
  Ferre mihi; in modica libera vita dape est.

The original Greek:

Ἀρκεῖ μοι χλαίνης λιτὸν σκέπας, οὐδὲ τραπέζαις
  δουλεύσω, Μουσέων ἄνθεα βοσκόμενος.
μισῶ πλοῦτον ἄνουν, κολάκων τροφόν, οὐδὲ παρ' ὀφρὺν
  στήσομαι· οἶδ' ὀλίγης δαιτὸς ἐλευθερίην.

Commentary in A.S.F. Gow and D.L. Page, The Greek Anthology: The Garland of Philip and Some Contemporary Epigrams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), vol. II, p. 324.

Concerning the genus Rudbeckia, see Nathaniel Lord Britton and Addison Brown, An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913; rpt. New York: Dover, 1970), III, 469:

Perennial or biennial (rarely annual), mostly rigid, usually rough or hispid herbs, with alternate undivided lobed or pinnatifid leaves, and large long-peduncled heads of tubular (mostly purple) and radiate (yellow) flowers. Involucre hemispheric, its bracts imbricated in 2-4 series. Receptacle conic or convex, with chaffy concave scales subtending or enveloping the disk-flowers. Ray-flowers neutral, the rays entire or toothed. Disk-flowers perfect, fertile, their corollas 5-lobed. Anthers entire or minutely 2-mucronate at the base. Style-branches tipped with hirsute appendages. Achenes 4-angled, obtuse or truncate at the apex. Pappus coroniform, sometimes of 2-4 short teeth, or none. [In honor of Claus Rudbeck, 1630-1702, Swedish anatomist and botanist.]

About 30 species, natives of North America and Mexico. In addition to the following, some 20 others occur in the southern and western United States. Type species: Rudbeckia hirta L.

But is the genus named after the elder Rudbeck, or his son, who lived from 1660 to 1740? See Linnaeus, letter to the younger Rudbeck (July 29, 1731), quoted in Wilfrid Blunt, The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus (London: W. Collins, 1971; rpt. Francis Lincoln Ltd., 2001), p. 35:

So long as the earth shall survive and as each spring shall see it covered with flowers, the Rudbeckia will preserve your glorious name....I have chosen a noble plant in order to recall your merits and the services you have rendered, a tall one to give an idea of your stature; and I wanted it to be one which branched and flowered and fruited freely, to show that you cultivated not only the sciences but also the humanities. Its rayed flowers will bear witness that you shone among savants like the sun among the stars; its perennial roots will remind us that each year sees you live again through new works. Pride of our gardens, the Rudbeckia will be cultivated throughout Europe and in distant lands where your revered name must long have been known. Accept this plant, not for what it is but for what it will become when it bears your name.

I can't find the original letter online, and I don't even know if it was written in Latin or Swedish, but there is a more complete translation of the letter in A.L.A. Fée, Vie de Linné (Paris: F.G. Levrault, 1832), pp. 85-87.

I also don't know which one of the 30 Rudbeckia species is in my garden, but it's probably not Rudbeckia hirta, as Britton and Brown (p. 470) call this species "biennial or sometimes annual" (p. 470), and the flowers in my garden are definitely perennial. There is a good description of the black-eyed susan in Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1964), pp. 121-122 (July 18 = Susan's Eyes):

Black-eyed Susan's eyes aren't really black at all. They are a purplish-brown, as anyone can see who takes the trouble to look for more than a passing glance at the Susans which are so profuse now at the roadside and in the meadows. Rudbeckia hirta is the official name, the botanical name, and it is a biennial flower that came out of the West along with commercial clover seed. Once in the East, it took to the soil and climate with vigor and pertinacity. Now its dark-eyed yellow flowers are common from Maine southward, wherever it finds a foothold. And it is particularly adaptable to almost any foothold available.

The yellow petals have a peculiarly rich golden color. They are full of sunlight. Like so many of the Compositae, its petals vary in number—thirteen on this flower, fifteen on another of the same plant, fourteen on the next flower. And they curl and twist, sometimes fray out at the tips for no obvious reason. The flower's sepals, the green "petals" that encase the bud and later form a supporting background for the flower, outnumber the petals, sometimes as much as two to one. And there are countless florets encircling the disk, Susan's eye; they open their tiny blossoms in succession and ring the disk with still another halo of golden yellow, the ripened pollen.

Bees and butterflies love the Susans, and so do most country youngsters. Weeds they certainly are when they invade the garden, but at the roadside they are bright and jaunty and full of the Summer sun. And they don't discourage easily, as many a gardener knows. Cut them or pull them up—they'll be back, as surely as the July sunshine, to which they belong.

Black-Eyed Susan, from my garden (July 14, 2010)

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), Praise of Laziness (Lob der Faulheit):

Laziness, now I want to bring you, too, a little song of praise. O — how trouble — some — it is for me — to extol — you — as you deserve! However, I will do my best; after work, to rest is good.

Summum bonum! The one who possesses you, his life is untroubled — alas! — I'm — yawning — I'm — getting worn out — now — please — forgive me for being unable to sing to you; indeed, you are preventing me from doing so.

Faulheit, jetzo will ich dir
Auch ein kleines Loblied bringen. —
O — wie sau — er — wird es mir —
Dich — nach Würden — zu besingen!
Doch, ich will mein bestes tun,
Nach der Arbeit ist gut ruhn.

Höchstes Gut! wer dich nur hat,
Dessen ungestörtes Leben —
Ach! — ich — gähn' — ich — werde matt —
Nun — so — magst du — mir's vergeben,
Daß ich dich nicht singen kann;
Du verhinderst mich ja dran.

German text from Peter Demetz and W.T.H. Jackson, An Anthology of German Literature: 800-1750 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 324, who in a note explain that sauer (usually = "sour, bitter") here = "troublesome, laborious".

Pieter van der Heyden, Desidia (Sloth),
after Pieter Bruegel the Elder
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