Let school-masters puzzle their brain,Lethe and Styx are rivers in the underworld, and the adjective Stygian is derived from Styx. Qui, quae, and quod are nominative singular relative pronouns in Latin, masculine, feminine, and neuter respectively.
With grammar, and nonsense, and learning;
Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,
Gives genus a better discerning.
Let them brag of their heathenish gods,
Their Lethes, their Styxes, and Stygians:
Their Quis, and their Quaes, and their Quods,
They're all but a parcel of Pigeons.
Toroddle, toroddle, toroll.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, October 30, 2004
A Parcel of Pigeons
Oliver Goldsmith, song from She Stoops to Conquer, Act 1: