Laudator Temporis Acti

We have ourselves seen an account of a sale of growing trees upon an estate in this district where the proceeds amounted to no less than six thousand pounds, a very large sum considering that the country was overstocked with wood, the demands for it confined to those of rural economy, and the means of transporting it extremely imperfect. There must have been a fall of large and valuable timber to have produced such a sum under such circumstances. The guardians of the noble proprietor, when they made the sale, seem to have given directions for enclosing the natural wood, with a view to its preservation. Nevertheless, about seventy or eighty years afterwards, there was scarcely in existence, upon the whole property, a twig sufficient to make a walking-stick, so effectually had the intentions of the guardians been baffled, and their instructions neglected. It may be some explanation of this wilful waste, that a stocking of goats (of all other creatures the most destructive to wood) had been put upon the ground after cutting the trees. But to speak the truth, agriculture, as Mr Shandy says of the noble science of defence, has its weak points. Those who pursue one branch of the art are apt to become bigoted and prejudiced against every thing which belongs to another, though no less essential, department. The arable cultivator, for example, has a sort of pleasure in rooting up the most valuable grass land, even where the slightest reflection might assure him that it would be more profitable to reserve it for pasture. The store-farmer and shepherd, in the same manner, used formerly to consider every spot occupied by a tree as depriving the flock of a certain quantity of food, and not only nourished malice against the woodland, but practically laboured for its destruction; and to such lamentable prejudices on the part of farmers, and even of proprietors, is the final disappearance of the natural forests of the north chiefly to be attributed. The neglect of enclosure on the side of the landlord; the permitted, if not the authorized, invasions of the farmer; the wilful introduction of sheep and cattle into the ground where old trees formerly stood, have been the slow, but effectual, causes of the denuded state of extensive districts, which, in their time, were tracts of what the popular poetry of the country called by the affectionate epithet of "the good green wood." Still, however, the facts of such forests having existed, ought now, in more enlightened times, to give courage to the proprietor, and stimulate him in his efforts to restore the silvan scenes which ignorance, prejudice, indolence, and barbarism combined to destroy.

Labels: arboricide

'These little Elzevirs are the memoranda and trophies of many a walk by night and morning through the Cowgate, the Canongate, the Bow, Saint Mary's Wynd, — wherever, in fine, there were to be found brokers and trokers, those miscellaneous dealers in things rare and curious. How often have I stood haggling on a halfpenny, lest, by a too ready acquiescence in the dealer's first price, he should be led to suspect the value I set upon the article! — how have I trembled, lest some passing stranger should chop in between me and the prize, and regarded each poor student of divinity that stopped to turn over the books at the stall, as a rival amateur, or prowling bookseller in disguise! — And then, Mr. Lovel, the sly satisfaction with which one pays the consideration, and pockets the article, affecting a cold indifference, while the hand is trembling with pleasure! — Then to dazzle the eyes of our wealthier and emulous rivals by showing them such a treasure as this — (displaying a little black smoked book about the size of a primer) — to enjoy their surprise and envy, shrouding meanwhile under a veil of mysterious consciousness our own superior knowledge and dexterity — these, my young friend, these are the white moments of life, that repay the toil, and pains, and sedulous attention, which our profession, above all others, so peculiarly demands!'

We are helpless in this world.
The years and months slip past
Like a swift stream, which grasps and drags us down.
A hundred pains pursue us, one by one.
Girls, with their wrists clasped round
With Chinese jewels, join hands
And play their youth away.
But time cannot be stopped,
And when their youth is gone
Their jet-black hair — black as fish's bowels —
Turns white, like a hard frost.
On their sun-browned, glowing faces,
Wrinkles are etched — by whom?
Boys, with their swords at their waists,
Clutching the hunting bow,
Mount their chestnut horses
On saddles linen-spun,
And ride on in their pride.
But is their world eternal?
He pushes back the door
Where a girl sleeps within,
Gropes to her side and lies
Arm on her jewel arm.
But how few are those nights
Before, with stick at waist,
He goes shunned and detested —
The old are always so.
We grudge life moving on
But we have no redress.
I would become as those
Firm rocks that see no change.
But I am a man in time
And time must have no stop.

Life is common to all, but merit is not. And accordingly Roman, Dahan, Sarmatian, Vandal, Hun, Gaetulian, Alamannian, Saxon, Galaulian, all walk on the same earth, all have the same sky and the same ocean bounding our world.

vivere commune est, sed non commune mereri.
denique Romanus, Daha, Sarmata, Vandalus, Hunnus,
Gaetulus, Garamans, Alamannus, Saxo, Galaula,
una omnes gradiuntur humo, caelum omnibus unum est,        810
unus et oceanus, nostrum qui continet orbem.

• Some Lines in Lucretius
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters (includes eight other examples from Prudentius)
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters in Sidonius
• Verse-Filling Asyndeton
• Verse-Filling Asyndeton: Some Greek Examples
• Another Greek Example of Verse-Filling Asyndeton
• More Examples of Asyndeton Filling Hexameters
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters in Corippus
• Twelve Gods
• Seven Cities
• A Hexameter Consisting of Nouns in Asyndeton
• More Hexameters Consisting of Words in Asyndeton
• Hexameters Consisting of Words in Asyndeton: Dracontius
• Zopyrus' Victims
• A Latin Hexameter Consisting of Adjectives in Asyndeton
• Hexameters Consisting Entirely of Words in Asyndeton: More Greek Examples
• A Sojourn in the Country
• Destruction
• Hexameters Consisting Entirely of Words in Asyndeton: A Horatian Example
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters: Bernard of Cluny, De Contemptu Mundi, Book I
• A Good Land
• A Greek Hexameter Consisting of Adjectives in Asyndeton
• Trifles
• Some Hexameters in Heiric of Auxerre's Life of St. Germanus
• Volturnalem Palatualem Furinalem
• Hexameters Consisting of Nouns in Asyndeton in a Medieval Poem

A.E. Housman died ninety years ago today, on April 30, 1936, at age seventy-seven. The poet was a classical scholar who edited Juvenal, Lucan and Propertius, and is famous for his five-volume critical edition of the minor Roman poet Manilius' Astronomicon.

Fixed points are provided by Housman's letter to Macmillan offering the edition (11 December 1885 = Burnett 1.58-9: 'The collection and arrangement of materials for the commentary will naturally demand further time and labour; and I therefore judge it best that the text with its apparatus criticus should be issued separately'), and by the publication in the Journal of Philology in 1892-3 of the three papers laying out his view of 'The Manuscripts of Propertius', for this effectively marked the end of his efforts to get an edition published (Cambridge University Press having followed Oxford and Macmillan in declining to publish a book: cf. University Library, Cambridge, Pr.B.13.9.59). Yet Housman's manuscript survived the scholar himself, and Professor Sandbach told more than once the story of visiting A.S.F. Gow, Housman's colleague at Trinity, in his rooms in 1936, and finding him stoking the fire in which he was burning the famously unpublished edition.

I do not crave to lie on a couch fit for a king when I'm dead; rather, may something good be mine while I'm alive. Thorns are as good a bed for the dead as rugs. It's all the same to him whether the bed is hard or soft.

οὐκ ἔραμαι κλισμῷ βασιληΐῳ ἐγκατακεῖσθαι
    τεθνεώς, ἀλλά τί μοι ζῶντι γένοιτ᾿ ἀγαθόν.
ἀσπάθαλοι δὲ τάπησιν ὁμοῖον στρῶμα θανόντι·
    τῷ ξυνόν, σκληρὸν γίνεται ἢ μαλακόν.

1194 τὸ ξύλον ἢ codd., corr. West

• Funeral Wishes of Charles Dickens
• Funeral Wishes of Philip Whalen
• Favorite Books
• Burial Wishes of Robinson Jeffers
• Burial Wishes of Cyril Connolly
• Burial Wishes of Samuel Butler
• Burial Wishes of Richard Burton
• Burial Wishes of James Howell
• Disregard of Funeral Instructions
• My Bed of Death
• Funeral of a Lover of Horace
• Cactus Ed's Funeral Instructions
• Kierkegaard's Tomb

Old age, resistless foe, how do I loathe thy presence! Them too I hate, whoso desire to lengthen out the span of life, seeking to turn the tide of death aside by philtres, drugs, and magic spells,—folk that death should take away to leave the young their place, when they no more can benefit the world.

ὦ δυσπάλαιστον γῆρας, ὡς μισῶ σ᾽ ἔχων,
μισῶ δ᾽ ὅσοι χρῄζουσιν ἐκτείνειν βίον,
βρωτοῖσι καὶ ποτοῖσι καὶ μαγεύμασι        1110
παρεκτρέποντες ὀχετὸν ὥστε μὴ θανεῖν·
οὓς χρῆν, ἐπειδὰν μηδὲν ὠφελῶσι γῆν,
θανόντας ἔρρειν κἀκποδὼν εἶναι νέοις.

Just now you said: 'Can we not construct or make or create a society?' My answer to that is, no. I don't believe that you do create societies. I believe that this social engineering, in which a group of people—in this case without consulting or being understood, let alone supported, by the mass of their fellow countrymen—say to themselves: 'Let's change this society; let us implant in it something which is profoundly different and alien; then let us see how it goes', is criminal levity.

"Back to our caves," — Redeamus ad antra, — if we are really believers in tradition; your real conservatives are the cavemen.

From an edition so conceived I have come to expect five things: a survey of the available witnesses, reasons for using some rather than others, accurate collation, guidance on the difference between the best text that can be extracted from the witnesses and what the author seems likely to have written, and substantial progress in at least one of these four. Ideally, the first two should be combined in a historical account, because the value of a witness depends on the aims, resources, and abilities of whoever produced it; but it would be a luxury to dwell on the ideal when many editions still fall at one or more of the five hurdles.