Laudator Temporis Acti

Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774-1776, edd. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), p. 217 (January 11, 1776):

Began to read Macquer's Chemistry while I was at stool, and thought that by getting a habit of reading it while at that operation, I would get through it by degrees, and each portion of it would be keenly seized.

Related post: A Place for Reading.

The Lark. Containing a Collection of above Four Hundred and Seventy Celebrated English and Scotch Songs (London: John Osborne, 1740), pp. 389-390 (Song CCCCXXV):

To hug your self in perfect Ease,
What wou'd you wish for more than these?
A healthy, clean, Paternal Seat,
Well shaded from the Summer's Heat.

A little Parlour-Stove, to hold     5
A constant Fire from Winter's Cold;
Where you may Sit and Think, and Sing,
Far off from Court, God bless the King!

Safe from the Harpies of the Law,
From Party-Rage, and Great Man's Paw;     10
Have few choice Friends to your own Taste;
A Wife agreeable and Chaste;

An open, but yet cautious Mind,
Where guilty Cares no Entrance find;
Nor Misers Fears, nor Envy's Spight,     15
To break the Sabbath of the Night.

Plain Equipage, and temp'rate Meals,
Few Taylors, and no Doctor's Bills;
Content to take, as Heav'n shall please,
A longer or a shorter Lease.     20

I've followed later editors in changing the final words of 11-12 from "Chaste...Caste" to "Taste...Chaste," although "Cast...Chaste" (in the 1742 edition of The Lark) is also a possibility. The poem is sometimes attributed to William Bedingfield. Whoever wrote it, it's a paraphrase of Martial 10.47:

Vitam quae faciant beatiorem,
iucundissime Martialis, haec sunt:
res non parta labore sed relicta;
non ingratus ager, focus perennis;
lis numquam, toga rara, mens quieta;
vires ingenuae, salubre corpus;
prudens simplicitas, pares amici;
convictus facilis, sine arte mensa;
nox non ebria sed soluta curis;
non tristis torus et tamen pudicus;
somnus qui faciat breves tenebras:
quod sis esse velis nihilque malis;
summum nec metuas diem nec optes.

Other translations of Martial's poem:

• Charles Cotton
  
• Abraham Cowley, Thomas Randolph
  
• Mildmay Fane
  
• Henry Howard
  
• Ben Jonson

Isaak Levitan, Small Hut in a Meadow

Biography of John Myers O'Hara, from the Newberry Library's Inventory of the John Myers O'Hara Papers:

Lawyer and stockbroker, but notably a writer of poetry, prose and literary translations.

Born into a wealthy family of Chicago in 1870, John O'Hara was educated and then practiced law in that city until he moved permanently to New York in his early thirties. He worked on Wall Street as a broker and although he and his whole family lost their fortunes in the 1929 crash and the subsequent depression, O'Hara continued not only to work in a brokerage house but carried on his life-long activity of writing and publishing poetry. Much of O'Hara's output was entirely his own, including volumes of sonnets and rather creative translations of Greek, Roman and French authors. He also produced poetical works purported to be translations of foreign literature but which actually were completely original works like Poems of Ming Wu (1941) and Xochicuicatl (1940).

When O'Hara's interpretation of the Poems of Sappho appeared in 1907 it was a critical success and later his own poetry collections, such as Pagan Sonnets, Manhattan, Threnodies and his last book Embers in 1921, received favorable notice. He was well-known and active in the poetical circles of his day, which is evident in his lengthy correspondence with several women writers, most notably Sara Teasdale.

John Myers O'Hara died in 1944.

Perhaps O'Hara's poem A Faun in Wall Street, published in The Smart Set 42.1 (January 1914) 142, is a self-portrait:

What shape so furtive steals along the dim
  Bleak street, barren of throngs, this day of June;
  This day of rest, when all the roses swoon
In Attic vales where dryads wait for him?
What sylvan this, and what the stranger whim
  That lured him here this golden afternoon;
  Ways where the dusk has fallen oversoon
In the deep canyon, torrentless and grim?

Great Pan is far, O mad estray, and these
  Bare walls that leap to heaven and hide the skies
Are fanes men rear to other deities;
  Far to the east the haunted woodland lies,
And cloudless still, from cyclad-dotted seas,
  Hymettus and the hills of Hellas rise.

Chief among the "other deities" (line 11) is doubtless Mammon.

I'm interested in forgotten minor poets, and I've read several of O'Hara's poems. Many exude a hothouse, perfervid atmosphere and probably deserve to be forgotten, but The Hearth, from his collection Embers (Portland: Smith & Sale, 1921), p. 13, seems better than most, if I am any judge:

In cynical seclusion from the world,
    The storm has made me hermit for the night,
While the mad gust against the pane is hurled,
    And all the ways are lost in blinding white.

I snatch a fair communing hour from life,
    A gracious respite from the venal plan,
And shielded by the elemental strife,
    I live a little space the finer man.

I prod the coals and rake the ashes thin,
    Adjust me snugly in my easy chair,
And breathe a sigh of vast contentment when
     I take the cherished book and banish care.

Ah, not with sparing zeal the Roman fought
    For hearth and altar in the ancient days;
I feel the dual comfort that he caught
    Beside the bright religion of the blaze.

And what benigner comrade could I claim,
    With rarer wisdom for the sheltered glow,
Than he who pondered by the crackling flame,
    While round his Sabine villa fell the snow.

In line 6, "the venal plan" may refer to the business of stockbrokering, and in line 12, the "cherished book" is of course Horace's Odes, whose manner O'Hara here imitates, not unsuccessfully.

Perhaps O'Hara is most famous for Atavism, published in The Bookman (November 1902) 229:

Old longings nomadic leap,
  Chafing at custom's chain;
Again from its brumal sleep
  Wakens the ferine strain.

Helots of houses no more,
  Let us be out, be free;
Fragrance through window and door
  Wafts from the woods, the sea.

After the torpor of will,
  Morbid with inner strife,
Welcome the animal thrill.
  Lending a zest to life.

Banish the volumes revered.
  Sever from centuries dead;
Ceilings the lamp flicker cheered
  Barter for stars instead.

Temple thy dreams with the trees,
  Nature thy god alone;
Worship the sun and the breeze,
  Altars where none atone.

Voices of solitude call,
  Whisper of sedge and stream;
Loosen the fetters that gall.
  Back to the primal scheme.

Feel the great throbbing terrene
  Pulse in thy body beat,
Conscious again of the green
  Verdure beneath the feet.

Callous to pain as the rose,
  Breathe with instinct's delight;
Live the existence that goes
  Soulless into the night.

Jack London quoted the first stanza of Atavism in Call of the Wild (1903).

The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931-1949, ed. Walter Hooper (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), pp. 613-614, with the editor's introductory note (in italics) and footnotes:

In his unpublished 'biography' of his brother, which later became the 'Memoir' to Letters of C.S. Lewis, Warnie wrote:

In May 1944 Jack received an amusing letter from the Society for the Prevention of Progress, of Walnut Creek, California, inviting him to become a member and requesting him to forward his credentials. The signature on his reply was instigated by one of the Society's rules to which his attention had been called:—Membership and the privileges of the Society are denied to such individuals as Henry A. Wallace³⁰ and this fellow Beveridge.³¹

TO THE SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF PROGRESS (L):

[Magdalen College
May 1944]

Dear Sir,

While feeling that I was born a member of your Society, I am nevertheless honoured to receive the outward seal of membership. I shall hope by continued orthodoxy and the unremitting practice of Reaction, Obstruction, and Stagnation to give you no reason for repenting your favour.

I humbly submit that in my Riddell Lectures entitled The Abolition of Man you will find another work not at all unworthy of consideration for admission to the canon.

Yours regressively,
C.S. Lewis

Beverages not Beveridges
(my motto)

³⁰Henry Agard Wallace (1888-1965) was Vice President of the United States, 1941-5, under Franklin D. Roosevelt. He ran for President in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket.

³¹William Henry Beveridge, first Lord Beveridge (1879-1963), a social reformer and economist, whose 'Beveridge plan' became the blueprint for the present welfare state.

As others have noted, Joel W. Hedgpeth (1911-2006) sent the invitation to Lewis. See Joel W. Hedgpeth: Marine Biologist and Environmentalist, interviewed by Ann Lage, 1992 (Berkeley: The Bancroft Library, 1996), pp. 113-114:

Lage: I don't know if this relates to Ricketts, although it seems to relate to some of his beliefs, but tell me about your Society for the Prevention of Progress. When did you found that society?

Hedgpeth: About 1944.

Lage: That seems ahead of its time, somehow.

Hedgpeth: Well, I showed a friend of mine who was in divinity school a statement I had cooked up about how the increase of material progress violates the lease granted to mankind by nature, or something, and he said, "Well, that's a very orthodox statement." [laughter]

Lage: How did it come about, and were there other people involved in the society?

Hedgpeth: Oh, people have asked to be members from time to time. There was a strange meeting in 1953 in Copenhagen. I was seated next to Erwin Stresemann, who was considered one of the world's great ornithologists. He had the general bearing of a Prussian field marshall, complete with monocle. We were discussing the business of nomenclature and how to control the names and prevent duplications and all that kind of stuff. It's really not the field of biology; it's a branch of Philadelphia lawyers or something.

Anyway, toward the end of the meeting, he leaned over, his monocle slipped off as usual, and he had to go around groping for it on the floor. He said, (in English), "What must I do to join the Society for the Prevention of Progress?" I said, "Sitting through this meeting for a week qualifies you for membership." [laughter]

Lage: Well, tell me what you experienced or observed that led you at that tender young age to start the Society for the Prevention of Progress?

Hedgpeth: Well, I wasn't so tender and young. After all, I was born in 1911.

Lage: Well, you weren't an old man. That would make you, what, thirty-three? Didn't you say you started it in '44?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, thirty-three. I'm eleven years behind the century; easy way to figure that out. Well, partly out of my experience in Shasta Dam and the debris dams.

Lage: What was that experience, with the debris dams?

Hedgpeth: See, the first assignment we had began in '38 working with the Corps of Engineers. They wanted to build a debris dam on the American River so hydraulic mining could be reopened. They'd selected a site north of the main fork of the American River about two or three miles above where the site of the now-unbuilt Auburn Dam is. One fine winter night, the site of the keyway (the excavation in the sides of the canyon for the dam) collapsed. They hadn't even started digging. The whole thing was unstable ground, where the engineers figured that it was a good dam site. And of course, at Shasta Dam the next year, we realized that that would be the end of the salmon.

Perhaps Hedgpeth sent the letter to Lewis over the pseudonymous signature Jerome Tichenor. See Frederick R. Schram and William A. Newman, "Joel W. Hedgpeth: 29 September 1911-28 July 2006," Journal of Crustacean Biology 27.2 (2007) 383-389 (at 385):

Joel delighted in deflating egos and the pretensions of "the powers that be." It was about this time that he adopted his nom de plume, Jerome Tichenor. He often penned memos to administrative types at Scripps, or letters to the editor of the local newspaper as Jerome Tichenor, President (and sole member) of the Society for the Prevention of Progress. Many a grad student and junior colleague wanted to join this august club, but Joel refused applications—growth in members would represent progress.

Ann Lage's interview with Joel W. Hedgpeth is only available to me in the form of text extracted by optical character recognition software, with all the errors which that normally entails. I've corrected some obvious errors, but only an examination of the book itself can show if the excerpt above is entirely accurate.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

Related posts:

• The Apolausticks
  
• A Most Unclubable Man?
  
• Join Nothing

No Votary Staunch as Thou reminded Eric Thomson of a contest between Horne Tooke and Richard Porson, recorded in Alexander Stephens, Memoirs of John Horne Tooke, Interspersed with Original Documents, Vol. II (London: J. Johnson and Co., 1813), pp. 315-316:

Mr. Porson is well known as professor of Greek at the university of Cambridge, and editor of several learned works, to which he added many elaborate notes and emendations. I have witnessed both the acumen of this gentleman's remarks, and the wonderful felicity of his memory, with astonishment. On observing to him, one evening, after he began to open upon us, that he had been wonderfully shy before and during dinner, he archly replied, "that Addison had never been himself, until after the second bottle."

I was told by Mr. Tooke, that he one day called on him at Wimbledon, and was detained to dinner. Some expressions of a disagreeable nature are said to have occurred at table, and the professor, at last, actually threatened both to kick and to cuff his host. On this the philologist, after exhibiting his own brawny chest, sinewy arms, and muscular legs, to the best possible advantage, endeavoured to evince the prudence of deciding the question as to strength, by recurring to a different species of combat. Accordingly, setting aside the port and sherry, then before them, he ordered a couple of quarts of brandy; and, by the time the second bottle was half emptied, the Greek fell vanquished under the table. On this, the victor, at this new species of Olympic game, taking hold of his antagonist's limbs in succession, exclaimed: " This is the foot that was to have kicked, and the hand that was to have cuffed me!" and then drinking one glass more, to the speedy recovery of his prostrate adversary, ordered, "that great care should be taken of Mr. professor Porson" after which he withdrew to the adjacent apartment, in which tea and coffee had been prepared, with the same seeming calmness as if nothing had occurred.

I should not have mentioned this scene, but that it is well known to all Mr. Tooke's friends, and almost to every one, who ever visited at Wimbledon. I have forborne to enumerate the particulars, as narrated to me by two gentlemen, who happened to be present, for I consider the whole scene as indecorous, and unworthy of two of the most accomplished scholars of this or any other age.

Bernd Heinrich, The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology (New York: Ecco, 2007; rpt. HarperPerennial, 2008), p. 6:

Another box contained copies of reprints of his scientific papers: page after page, now coated in dust and yellowed. These were the culmination of his lifework—the work that had stood at the center of his entire existence—prepared with such painstaking devotion and sacrifice. I felt saddened to see them now discarded and decaying in the barn attic. Probably fewer than a dozen people had ever read any of these papers. Most people have never even heard of ichneumon wasps, and many of those who have would be likely to disparage them as "flies."

Id., pp. 8-9:

Looking at the boxes full of old, unreadable reprints in Mamusha's hayloft, I now felt a tinge of regret. Poking around, I noticed a book with a green cover. It was water-stained from snow that had come in through the open windows for decades. It was also garnished with gobs of dried bird manure, but underneath in gold lettering I read: "Burmesische Ichneumoninae, Part 1, by Gerd Heinrich, Dryden [referring to our one-room post office next to the town of Wilton], Maine, U.S.A." A second volume was labeled "Part 2."

To the undiscerning eye, these two books would have no more meaning than they did to the chickens that had scratched among their pages. Yet I knew what they had meant to Papa. He had been a combatant in two world wars. He understood all too well the fleeting nature of existence. Somehow, against all odds, he not only had survived, escaped, and started, with nothing, all over again, but had gone on to produce this work that would long outlive him. And here it was, covered in chicken shit, scattered in the dust and unread. I thought, How "immortal" is a lifework if the subject is so obscure that hardly a soul takes an interest in it?

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), Poems, Dialogues in Verse and Epigrams, ed. Charles G. Crump, vol. II (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1892), p. 167:

Ten thousand flakes about my windows blow,
Some falling and some rising, but all snow.
Scribblers and statesmen! are ye not just so?

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), Poems, Dialogues in Verse and Epigrams, ed. Charles G. Crump, vol. II (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1892), p. 278:

'Twas far beyond the midnight hour
  And more than half the stars were falling,
And jovial friends, who lost the power
  Of sitting, under chairs lay sprawling;

Not Porson so; his stronger pate
  Could carry more of wine and Greek
Than Cambridge held; erect he sate;
  He nodded, yet could somehow speak.

"'Tis well, O Bacchus! they are gone,
  Unworthy to approach thy altar!
The pious man prays best alone,
  Nor shall thy servant ever falter."

Then Bacchus too, like Porson, nodded,
  Shaking the ivy on his brow,
And graciously replied the godhead,
  "I have no votary staunch as thou."

Richard Porson (1759-1808), famous Greek scholar, was also a renowned toper. See Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, to which is added Porsoniana, 2nd ed. (London: Edward Moxon, 1856), pp. 299-301 (footnote omitted):

At dinner, and after it, he preferred port to any other wine. He disliked both tea and coffee.

Porson would sit up drinking all night, without seeming to feel any bad effects from it. Home Tooke told me that he once asked Porson to dine with him in Richmond Buildings; and, as he knew that Porson had not been in bed for the three preceding nights, he expected to get rid of him at a tolerably early hour. Porson, however, kept Tooke up the whole night; and in the morning, the latter, in perfect despair, said, " Mr. Porson, I am engaged to meet a friend at breakfast at a coffee-house in Leicester Square."—" Oh," replied Porson, " I will go with you;" and he accordingly did so. Soon after they had reached the coffee-house, Tooke contrived to slip out, and running home, ordered his servant not to let Mr. Porson in, even if he should attempt to batter down the door. "A man," observed Tooke, "who could sit up four nights successively might have sat up forty."

Tooke used to say that " Porson would drink ink rather than not drink at all." Indeed, he would drink any thing. He was sitting with a gentleman, after dinner, in the chambers of a mutual friend, a Templar, who was then ill and confined to bed. A servant came into the room, sent thither by his master for a bottle of embrocation which was on the chimney-piece. "I drank it an hour ago," said Porson.

When Hoppner the painter was residing in a cottage a few miles from London, Porson, one afternoon, unexpectedly arrived there. Hoppner said that he could not offer him dinner, as Mrs. H. had gone to town, and had carried with her the key of the closet which contained the wine. Porson, however, declared that he would be content with a mutton-chop, and beer from the next alehouse; and accordingly stayed to dine. During the evening Porson said, "I am quite certain that Mrs. Hoppner keeps some nice bottle, for her private drinking, in her own bedroom; so, pray, try if you can lay your hands on it." His host assured him that Mrs. H. had no such secret stores; but Porson insisting that a search should be made, a bottle was at last discovered in the lady's apartment, to the surprise of Hoppner, and the joy of Porson, who soon finished its contents, pronouncing it to be the best gin he had tasted for a long time. Next day, Hoppner, somewhat out of temper, informed his wife that Porson had drunk every drop of her concealed dram. "Drunk every drop of it!" cried she: "my God, it was spirits-of-wine for the lamp!"

John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941; rpt. New York: Penguin Books, 2009), pp. 28-29:

We sat on a crate of oranges and thought what good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world—temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. Once in a while one comes on the other kind—what used in the university to be called a "dry-ball"—but such men are not really biologists. They are the embalmers of the field, the picklers who see only the preserved form of life without any of its principle. Out of their own crusted minds they create a world wrinkled with formaldehyde. The true biologist deals with life, with teeming boisterous life, and learns something from it, learns that the first rule of life is living. The dry-balls cannot possibly learn a thing every starfish knows in the core of his soul and in the vesicles between his rays. He must, so know the starfish and the student biologist who sits at the feet of living things, proliferate in all directions. Having certain tendencies, he must move along their lines to the limit of their potentialities. And we have known biologists who did proliferate in all directions: one or two have had a little trouble about it. Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity with moral ethics.

Excerpts from Eric Ormsby, The 'Born Schulmeister', in Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (The Porcupine's Quill, 2011), pp. 243-252 (on S.D. Goitein).

p. 245:

Once he told me that while making his rounds he used to carry a volume from a massive medieval biography of the Sufi saints in Arabic in his uniform pocket and would read this on his lunch break.

p. 247:

Goitein once said to me, 'I am a pugnacious man. I work out my pugnacity every day trying to figure out these medieval letters. I have to fight to understand them and in this way, I take out my aggressive instincts on paper and not on other people.'

p. 248:

I remember one class in which a student offered a novel translation of a difficult word. Goitein paused. With uplifted hand he said, 'Wait, let me taste that for a minute!' and he actually smacked his lips in a kind of lexical mastication.

p. 249:

What made him special as a teacher and why do I remember him so fondly, over thirty years since I first studied with him and over twenty years since his death?

Not for his idiosyncracies alone but for his genius in inspiring a love of passionate precision combined with an equal love of historical imagination. Before a text, whether it was a text on the love of God or a stanza of Bedouin poetry or a dunning letter from a medieval merchant, his whole being became engaged and magically expansive. And like a sorcerer he pulled surprise after surprise out of what to us seemed dry bones indeed. His knowledge was exceedingly exact. If he compared a word in an Arabic poem with a cognate term from the Book of Job, it was because there was a precise and demonstrable parallel to be drawn; he was never impressionistic and vague but spoke always on the basis of strict learning and scientific principle. At the same time he was seldom narrowly pedantic. He saw human history as a continuum in which present and past were connected. What we were reading, or attempting to read, had something to do with us too; not because it was 'relevant' in the narrow contemporary sense but because spiritually, intellectually and emotionally we were all still part of that continuous past.

Thus, in reading an author he would often refer to him as 'our friend'. Our friend Ibn Khaldun says this, our friend Maimonides says that. To him, through the force and beauty of the word, these men were still living presences and, in reading their works, we encountered them.

p. 251:

But what made Goitein a great teacher was not merely his own erudition, fabulous as it was, or the warmth of his personality or even his passionate convictions but his lifelong, incurable, and unquenchable curiosity. He was a perpetual student himself and in a state of concentrated delight at every new fact or hint of a fact....Nothing was too foreign, nothing was too insignificant, for notice; every person and every occasion and every object was valuable and instructive. When a passionate dog-lover married into his family, he promptly sat down and became a dazzling authority on dogs so as to be able to converse with his new in-law and make her feel at home; often he astonished us with his arcane knowledge of schnauzers and Bedlington terriers. In this too he embodied the teaching of the Sages. Does it not say in Avoth: 'Despise not any man and discard not any thing, for there is not a man who has not his hour and not a thing which has not its place?'

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

Thanks to Eric Thomson for what follows.

---

A volume of John Muir has just come to light this morning....I opened the book at random and came across this passage, which I thought you'd like.

An exciting time came when at the age of seven or eight years I left the auld Davel Brae school for the grammar school. Of course I had a terrible lot of fighting to do, because a new scholar had to meet every one of his age who dared to challenge him, this being the common introduction to a new school. It was very strenuous for the first month or so, establishing my fighting rank, taking up new studies, especially Latin and French, getting acquainted with new classmates and the master and his rules. In the first few Latin and French lessons the new teacher, Mr. Lyon, blandly smiled at our comical blunders, but pedagogical weather of the severest kind quickly set in, when for every mistake, everything short of perfection, the taws was promptly applied. We had to get three lessons every day in Latin, three in French, and as many in English, besides spelling, history, arithmetic, and geography. Word lessons in particular, the wouldst-couldst-shouldst-have-loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of the French, Latin, and English grammars to memory, and in connection with reading-lessons we were called on to recite parts of them with the rules over and over again, as if all the regular and irregular incomprehensible verb stuff was poetry. In addition to all this, father made me learn so many Bible verses every day that by the time I was eleven years of age I had about three fourths of the Old Testament and all of the New by heart and by sore flesh. I could recite the New Testament from the beginning of Matthew to the end of Revelation without a single stop. The dangers of cramming and of making scholars study at home instead of letting their little brains rest were never heard of in those days. We carried our school-books home in a strap every night and committed to memory our next day's lessons before we went to bed, and to do that we had to bend our attention as closely on our tasks as lawyers on great million-dollar cases. I can't conceive of anything that would now enable me to concentrate my attention more fully than when I was a mere stripling boy, and it was all done by whipping,—thrashing in general. Old-fashioned Scotch teachers spent no time in seeking short roads to knowledge, or in trying any of the new-fangled psychological methods so much in vogue nowadays. There was nothing said about making the seats easy or the lessons easy. We were simply driven pointblank against our books like soldiers against the enemy, and sternly ordered, "Up and at 'em. Commit your lessons to memory!" If we failed in any part, however slight, we were whipped; for the grand, simple, all-sufficing Scotch discovery had been made that there was a close connection between the skin and the memory, and that irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree.

John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), pp. 30-33.

It struck me that round about the same time (they were born within three years of each other, the one in 1838 and the other in 1835), and only fifty miles away (the distance from Dunbar to Dunfermline), another Scot and very different future American was being subjected to a similar regime:

[The school] was housed in a one-room school-house, with a tiny fireplace near the front door that barely removed the chill. Martin's desk was on an elevated podium. On it sat his "lum", or satin high hat, and his "tawse", a leather strap employed regularly on those he found sleeping or slovenly or just stupid. The classroom was arrayed in "forms", rows of stiff-backed benches on which scholars sat, ranged in order of age and accomplishment. Each form was ruled by an older student who acted as form monitor or dictator. Martin, whom his daughter later described as "tall, though stoop-shouldered," provided the monitors with words or sums which they dictated to their forms, each member of which was expected to copy the dictation on his or her slate and/or recite it in unison to the "dictator". While the instruction proceeded on the floor below, Martin watched from his perch, on the ready to hurl his tawse at a recalcitrant scholar, who was bidden to retrieve it, return it to the podium, and receive a lash across his hands.

David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 16-17.

Readers will wait in vain for damning verdicts from either:

Muir: "All these various thrashings were admirably influential in developing not only memory but fortitude as well." Ibid., p. 29.

Carnegie: "The school was a perfect delight to me and if anything occurred which prevented my attendance I was unhappy." Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), p. 20.

---

Henry Edward Lamson, A Country School
Related post: Plagosus Orbilius.

John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941; rpt. New York: Penguin Books, 2009), pp. 16-17:

We have looked into the tide pools and seen the little animals feeding and reproducing and killing for food. We name them and describe them and, out of long watching, arrive at some conclusion about their habits, so that we say, "This species typically does thus and so." But we do not objectively observe our own species as a species, although we know the individuals fairly well. When it seems that men may be kinder to men, that wars may not come again, we completely ignore the record of our species. If we used the same smug observation on ourselves that we do on hermit crabs, we would be forced to say, with the information at hand, "It is one diagnostic trait of Homo sapiens that groups of individuals are periodically infected with a feverish nervousness which causes the individuals to turn on and destroy, not only his own kind, but the works of his own kind. It is not known whether this be caused by a virus, some airborne spore, or whether it be a species reaction to some meteorological stimulus as yet undetermined." Hope, which is another species diagnostic trait —the hope that this may not always be—does not in the least change the observable past and present. When two crayfish meet, they usually fight. One would say that perhaps they might not at a future time, but without some mutation it is not likely that they will lose this trait. And perhaps our species is not likely to forgo war without some psychic mutation which at present, at least, does not seem imminent. And if one places the blame for killing and destroying on economic insecurity, on inequality, on injustice, he is simply stating the proposition in another way. We have what we are. Perhaps the crayfish feels the itch of jealousy, or perhaps he is sexually insecure. The effect is that he fights. When in the world there shall come twenty, thirty, fifty years without evidence of our murder trait, under whatever system of justice or economic security, then we may have a contrasting habit pattern to examine. So far there is no such situation. So far the murder trait of our species is as regular and observable as our various sexual habits.

Related post: Two Men.

I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1988; rpt. New York: Anchor Books), p. xi:

In my day, even in a country high school, one had four years of Latin to prepare for college, and Catullus and Lucretius were among my early enthusiasms. But I had only one semester of Greek in college before I dropped out in my junior year.

I decided in retirement to learn enough Greek to be able to grapple with conceptual terms for myself. I started on my own with a bilingual edition of the Gospel of St. John, then went on to the first book of the Iliad. But the study of Greek soon led me far afield into the Greek poets and Greek literature generally. Their exploration continues to be a joy.

Johann Hamza, An Old Man Reading

Labels: opsimathy

Greek Anthology 9.161 (Marcus Argentarius, tr. W.R. Paton, with Paton's note):

As I was turning over the pages of a volume of Hesiod, I suddenly saw Pyrrhe approaching. Throwing the book on the ground I exclaimed: "Why should I be bothered by your works,² old Hesiod?"

²There is a play on the title Works and Days of one of Hesiod's poems.

Ἡσιόδου ποτὲ βίβλον ἐμαῖς ὑπὸ χερσὶν ἑλίσσων
  Πύρρην ἐξαπίνης εἶδον ἐπερχομένην·
βίβλον δὲ ῥίψας ἐπὶ γῆν χερί, τοῦτ᾽ ἐβόησα:
  "ἔργα τί μοι παρέχεις, ὦ γέρον Ἡσίοδε;"

Arthur William Ryder, Original Poems, together with Translations from the Sanskrit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939), p. 67 (this poem is a translation from the Sanskrit):

How long may subtle logic play its part
In science and theology and art?
  So long as no young fawn-eyed maiden's glance
Shall find its way to the logician's heart.

Jean Jacques Henner, La Liseuse

The Day-Book of John Stuart Blackie (London: Grant Richards, 1902), pp. 62-63:

1. Lies of carelessness, from loose observation and hasty generalisation—any hour's talk full of them.

2. Lies of cowardice, from fear of facing the truth, as when a man, labouring under a dangerous disease, reasons himself into the belief that he is quite well.

3. Lies of politeness, very common with women; taking the sting out of the truth, for fear of giving offence.

4. Lies of flattery, from a benevolent desire to please, or from a selfish desire to gain something by pleasing.

5. Lies of self-glorification, magnifying our own virtues, or the virtues of the class to which we belong. This includes patriotic lies, sectarian lies, and almost every kind of lie that masks selfishness under a grand name.

6. Lies of malevolent hostility, consciously intended to deceive an adversary, as in war.

7. Lies of self-defence, to save Nature when a force is put upon her; or to save one's life, where honour is not concerned.

8. Lies of benevolence, as to save another person's life, as when a righteous man flies to you for concealment, hounded by his persecutors, and you say he is not in your house.

9. Lies of convention, as when you call a man a gentleman who is not a gentleman in any proper sense of the word; or when you call the king, in the prayer-book, a most religious and gracious sovereign, when he may be a great blackguard; or when you call yourself 'your humble servant,' when you are as proud as Lucifer.

10. Lies of modesty, when you say you cannot do what you can do, to avoid the appearance of forwardness.

11. Lies.

William Beckford (1759-1844), written in his copy of Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

The time is not far distant, Mr. Gibbon, when your almost ludicrous self-complacency, your numerous, and apparently wilful mistakes, your frequent distortions of historical Truth to provoke a gibe, or excite a sneer at everything most sacred and venerable, your ignorance of the oriental languages, your limited and far from acutely critical knowledge of the Latin and the Greek, and in the midst of all the prurient and obscene gossip of your notes—your affected moral purity perking up every now and then from the corrupt mass like artificial roses shaken off in the dark by some Prostitute on a heap of manure, your heartless scepticism, your unclassical fondness for meretricious ornament, your tumid diction, your monotonous jingle of periods, will be still more scouted and exposed than they have been. Once fairly kicked off from your lofty, bedizened stilts, you will be reduced to your just level and true standard.

The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. Leonard Cyril Martin, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), p. 635 (translation of Claudian, Carmina Minora 20, with the title The old man of Verona out of Claudian):

Most happy man! who in his own sweet fields
Spent all his time; to whom one Cottage yields
In age and youth a lodging; who grown old
Walks with his staff on the same soil and mold
Where he did creep an infant, and can tell
Many fair years spent in one quiet Cell!
No toils of fate made him from home far known,
Nor foreign waters drank, driv'n from his own.
No loss by Sea, no wild lands wasteful war
Vex'd him; not the brib'd Coil of gowns at bar.
Exempt from cares, in Cities never seen
The fresh field-air he loves, and rural green.
The years set turns by fruits, not Consuls knows;
Autumn by apples: May by blossom'd boughs.
Within one hedg his Sun doth set and rise,
The world's wide day his short Demeasnes comprise.
Where he observes some known, concrescent twig
Now grown an Oak, and old, like him, and big.
Verona he doth for the Indies take,
And as the red Sea counts Benacus lake.
Yet are his limbs and strength untir'd, and he
A lusty Grandsire three descents doth see.
Travel and sail who will, search sea or shore;
This man hath liv'd, and that hath wander'd more.

Claudian's Latin:

Felix, qui propriis aevum transegit in arvis,
  ipsa domus puerum quem videt, ipsa senem;
qui baculo nitens in qua reptavit harena
  unius numerat saecula longa casae.
illum non vario traxit fortuna tumultu,
  nec bibit ignotas mobilis hospes aquas.
non freta mercator tremuit, non classica miles,
  non rauci lites pertulit ille fori.
indocilis rerum, vicinae nescius urbis
  adspectu fruitur liberiore poli.
frugibus alternis, non consule computat annum:
  autumnum pomis, ver sibi flore notat.
idem condit ager soles idemque reducit,
  metiturque suo rusticus orbe diem,
ingentem meminit parvo qui gemine quercum
  aequaevumque videt consenuisse nemus,
proxima cui nigris Verona remotior Indis
  Benacumque putat litora Rubra lacum.
sed tamen indomitae vires firmisque lacertis
  aetas robustum tertia cernit avum.
erret et extremos alter scrutetur Hiberos:
  plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae.

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

• There Was an Old Man of Verona (Abraham Cowley, Maurice Platnauer)
  
• Happy the Man (Thomas Randolph)

Walter Langley,
The Sunny South

John Stuart Blackie, Notes of a Life (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1910), pp. 19-22:

Of Dr Mearns' learning, in the technical sense of the word, I can, however, say nothing, but so far as Greek and Latin were concerned, my other theological instructor, Dr Laurence Brown, was a man, most unquestionably, rigged out classically in a style of which our Scottish Divinity Halls have still too few examples. Dr Brown had been educated in Holland, and acquired there that familiar habit of thinking and speaking in elegant Latin which the perverse pedantic methods stereotyped in the great English schools render it so difficult even now for the best English scholars to attain. Dr Brown's example acted as a useful spur to me in carrying on that course of Greek and Latin reading, without which no thorough theological training is possible. Every student in those days, and I believe still, had to compose a theological discourse in the Latin language, and this is done by the Divinity student bonâ fide, not pro forma only through a grinder, as used to be the case with young advocates and medical men in Edinburgh. Being a born enemy of all hollow work, I, of course, worked up my Latin so high as to make a very respectable appearance in this exercise, and not only so, but I ventured on speaking Latin publicly, with some measure of success, which made me a sort of marked man in that department. As I have always maintained, and see more clearly every day, that the English and Scottish schoolmasters and professors make a great mistake in dropping the old element of conversation and free speaking out of their method of teaching the learned languages, I will mention here how it was that I acquired that habit myself. Dr Brown, as I said, could think and speak Latin quite as readily as English, and had the habit of always criticising in Latin the Latin discourses delivered by the students. He had the habit also of insisting that no criticism should be made on the Latin exercise of any student except in the Latin language. The consequence of this was that no criticism was ever given on Latin discourses at all, except by the Professor. To me this appeared rather a cowardly and inglorious procedure, so I determined, when a convenient opportunity should arise, to redeem the honour of the class from this blot. One day the usual appeal was made by the Professor, "Tam vero, si quis habet quae de hac oratione dicat, in medium proferat!" whereupon I rose up and began to make some observations in English, but the old Doctor, immediately striking his hand emphatically on the table, said, " At hoc non fas est, domine; quae Latine scripta, ea et Latine judicanda sunt," an observation for which I was perfectly prepared, and came out at once with a few sentences of well-worded Ciceronian Latin, which elicited the admiration of the venerable old divine, and made me a notable man, even among Aberdeen Latinists. This habit of thinking and speaking readily in Latin I have never since lost, and have also applied the same method of learning to all languages whatsoever; for I have not the slightest doubt of its being the only rational and philosophical method: a method at once the most natural, and, if properly managed, the most easy and the most accurate. I do not think I fell upon this method merely from the Doctor's example; it must have had its root in the plastic activity of my own mind, which always leads me to adopt a method of proceeding in everything, acting from within outwards. The mere receptive operation of reading I instinctively converted into a gymnastic of thinking and speaking: and I remember distinctly that, after reading several chapters of my favourite author Cicero, I used to spout his phrases, and form them on the spot into new sentences of my own, which, to fix them more vividly in my mind, I scrawled out upon the broad white wooden mantelpiece of the room where I studied. These things I have set down minutely for the benefit of those who may imagine that there is a peculiar organ or faculty by which languages are acquired. I believe there is no such thing. All that is necessary to acquire one, or two, or half a dozen languages, is only common-sense, favourable circumstances, a fair amount of mental activity, and a natural pleasure in utterance.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

Aesop, Fable 125 Chambry (tr. Laura Gibbs, with her note):

Zeus invited all the animals to his wedding. The tortoise alone was absent, and Zeus did not know why, so he asked the tortoise her reason for not having come to the feast. The tortoise said, 'Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.' Zeus got angry at the tortoise and ordered her to carry her house with her wherever she went.

The fable shows that people often prefer to live simply at home than to live lavishly at someone else's house.

Note: The Greek maxim pronounced by the tortoise can be translated literally as 'home is dear, home is best,' oikos philos, oikos aristos.

Ζεὺς γαμῶν πάντα τὰ ζῷα εἱστία. Μόνης δὲ χελώνης ὑστερησάσης, διαπορῶν τὴν αἰτίαν, τῇ ὑστεραίᾳ ἐπυνθάνετο αὐτῆς διὰ τά μόνη ἐπὶ τὸ δεῖπνον οὐκ ἦλθε. Τῆς δὲ εἰπούσης· Οἶκος φίλος, οἶκος ἄριστος, ἀγανακτήσας κατ' αὐτῆς παρεσκεύασεν αὐτὴν τὸν οἶκον αὐτὸν βαστάζουσαν περιφέρειν. Οὕτω πολλοὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων αἱροῦνται μᾶλλον λιτῶς οἰκεῖν ἢ παρ' ἄλλοις πολυτελῶς διαιτᾶσθαι.

A case could be made for translating φίλος here as "one's own" (Liddell & Scott, s.v., sense I.2.c), i.e. "one's own home is [the] best home." Note the medieval Latin version (Hans Walther, Proverbia Sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi #6259)—Domus propria, domus optima.

Eric Thomson sent me a photocopy of Renzo Tosi, Dicionário de Sentenças Latinas e Gregas, tr. Ivone Castilho Benedetti (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1996), pp. 487-488 (#1047 = Οἶκος φίλος, οἶκος ἄριστος), in which the Portuguese translation of the proverb is "Casa nossa, casa ótima."

On the other hand, another Latin version is Domus amica, domus optima, which is the translation adopted by Erasmus. See The Adages of Erasmus, selected by William Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 268-270 (III iii 38, on Οἶκος φίλος οἶκος ἄριστος, tr. R.A.B. Mynors, footnotes omitted):

A loved home is always the best home. Nowhere can a lucky man live in more convenience, more freedom, and more comfort than at home. Some people with humorous distortion apply this to the tortoise, of which the following tale is told. Jupiter once invited animals of all kinds to attend his wedding, and all the others came, but not the tortoise. He was much surprised, and when she turned up (which was not until the feast was over), he asked her what the reason was for the delay. And she replied 'A loved home is the best home.' Jupiter was angry, and gave orders that wherever she went in future, she should carry her home about with her. Hence the tortoise is described in the second book of his On Divination, with deliberate and humorous obscurity, as 'Earth's tardigrade, home-carrying. bloodless creature.' (For we must, I take it, read terrae, earth's, for terrigenam, earth-born).

Besides which, the privacy of home has the support of the civil law. This Gaius in the Pandects, book 4, title De in jus vocando: 'It has been commonly held that no man may be summoned to court from his own home, because each man's home is his safest refuge and place of resort, and he therefore who should summon him to court from his home was thought to commit a violent assault.' Similarly Paulus in Book I, title De regulis juris. Cicero alludes to the fable in one of his letters, writing to Dolabella: 'This place is pretty, or at any rate remote, and if you have something to write, free from interruption. But somehow, "a loved home," you know.' This corresponds with one I have placed elsewhere: 'He for whom all goes well should stay at home,' for to him alone a loved home is the best home. Otherwise, to the man whose home contains a quarrelsome wife and nothing to eat, home is a prison. On the other hand, Plutarch has a word for this idle sort of man who is happy indoors and in the shade, and loves to be always sitting motionless at home. he calls them oikouroi, home-keepers. And in his essay 'On Tranquillity of Mind' he disapproves of this stay-at-home lack of activity. Again in his 'Advice to Bride and Groom' he records that Phidias made a stuatue of Venus for the people of Elis with her foot on a tortoise, as a tacit suggestion that wives should stay at home and hold their peace. Plutarch also tells of a custom in Egypt that newly wedded wives should not wear sandals, to prevent them of course from ever leaving the house. All the same, this ideal would have little chance of acceptance by our own countrywomen, as they flit busily round all the markets and all the wine-shops and everywhere on earth by land or sea.

This seems the place to add a remark recorded by Plutarch in his life of Titus Flaminius. When seeking to persuade the Achains that they should not lay claim to the island of Zacynthos, 'They would' he said 'run risks like tortoises, if they struck their heads out beyond the Peloponnese.' Livy has simething very like this in book six of his Macedonian War, where Quinctius speaks as follows: 'If I thought that the possession of that island was of any value to the Achaeans, I would recommend the Roman government to let you have it. But I have my eye on the tortoise: gathered into its shell, it is safe from all attacks, but when it puts out any part of itself, whatever it exposes is at risk and defenceless. It is much the same with you Achaeans: you are enclosed on all sides by the bounds of the sea, and what lies within the Peloponnese, you can add to your own, and easily defend what you have added; but if you exceed those limits in your greed for further acquisitions, all your overseas possessions are naked and exposed to all attacks.'

One of the earliest references to this proverb seems to be by the poet Philoxenus (died 380 B.C.), as preserved in Suda 291 (Εἰς λατομίας, cited by Tosi, tr. Tony Natoli):

To the quarries: Philoxenos the dithyrambic poet could not stand the poetry of the tyrant Dionysius because it was so bad. On one occasion Dionysius sent him to the quarries, but later decided to have him brought back up. However, upon enquiring the reason [sc. for the tyrant's change of heart] Philoxenus replied, 'How much better it is to stay there than to suffer his [i.e. Dionysius'] poetry'; and he added, 'Truly, home is dear, home is best', just as it is for the tortoise.

Εἰς λατομίας: Φιλόξενος ὁ διθυραμβοποιὸς οὐκ ἀνεχόμενος τῶν Διονυσίου τοῦ τυράννου ποιημάτων ὡς φαύλων, ποτὲ πέμψαντος αὐτὸν εἰς λατομίας τοῦ Διονυσίου, τὸ δὲ ὕστερον αὐτὸς ἑκὼν ἐξανέστη, τοῦ δὲ ἐπερωτωμένου τὴν αἰτίαν, τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, ὡς κρεῖττον εἶναι ἐκεῖ διατρίβειν ἢ τῶν αὐτοῦ ποιημάτων ἀνέχεσθαι, τοῦτο ἐπειπόντα: ἦ οἶκος φίλος, οἶκος ἄριστος: ἅπερ ἐστὶ τῆς χελώνης.

Greek Anthology 9.71 (Antiphilus of Byzantium, tr. W.R. Paton):

Overhanging branches of the spreading oak, that from on high shade well men seeking shelter from the untempered heat, leafy boughs roofing closer than tiles, the home of wood-pigeons, the home of cicadas, O noontide branches, guard me, too, who lie beneath your foliage, taking refuge from the rays of the sun.

κλῶνες ἀπῃόριοι ταναῆς δρυός, εὔσκιον ὕψος
  ἀνδράσιν ἄκρητον καῦμα φυλασσομένοις,
εὐπέταλοι, κεράμων στεγανώτεροι, οἰκία φαττῶν,
  οἰκία τεττίγων, ἔνδιοι ἀκρεμόνες,
κἠμὲ τὸν ὑμετέραισιν ὑποκλινθέντα κόμαισιν
  ῥύσασθ᾽, ἀκτίνων ἠελίου φυγάδα.

Asher Brown Durand,
In the Shade of the Old Oak Tree